


Something Borrowed, Something Blues

by MaryPSue



Series: Reincarnation Blues [7]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), F/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-26 07:19:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13230747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: After foiling Bill Cipher's plans to restore himself to full power, Dipper had let himself hope that maybe, just maybe, the worst of the craziness involving Ian Beale was over.Oh, how wrong he was.Between ancient spirits rising from slumber, past lives coming back to haunt their unsuspecting owners, and sorting out a misplaced order of bridesmaid dresses, planning a wedding has never been so stressful. Just what is it that awaits Mira, Ian, and company in the woods of Gravity Falls?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> New year, new WIP! I figured I'd start the year off right with the...uh, long-awaited? sequel to Reincarnation Blues! Special thanks to [Seiya234](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiya234/pseuds/Seiya234) for helping me plot and outline this baby.
> 
> Yes, it starts with a scene you may have already...seen. Bear with me. We're going places.

“So. Season two. Any ideas about how to start it off with a bang?”

There was a general shuffling of papers and buzz around the writers’ room table. Zelda, unsurprisingly, was the first to speak. “Well, the viewers are still losing it over Bael. I thought -”

“Just a moment,” Ian interrupted. “Do you guys think we can hold off on having Bael show up again until the finale?”

Around the table, the team exchanged looks.

“What, like…like a horror movie, kind of suspense build, sort of thing? Yeah dude, that makes sense,” Ricardo said, but he still sounded uncertain. “But - all the way to the finale? That seems like too long, man. Now he’s shown his hand, wouldn’t Bael be trying to kill Stella, like, constantly?”

Ian blinked. “What? Why would he be trying to kill her?”

The look Zelda shot him was one Ian knew she only turned in his direction when he was being particularly inscrutable or ridiculous. “We did just literally finish the season with him using Sam as a puppet to try to drop her down a bottomless pit.”

“Yeah, but Stella doesn’t know that’s Bael! We revealed him to the audience through Alcor, but she still doesn’t know he even exists. Why would he try to kill her? Think about his endgame, guys.”

The faces around the table were still blank. Ian met Zelda’s eyes, hoping for understanding from the writer who was practically his second brain, but she just gave her head a shake so small it barely disturbed her bubblegum-coloured hair.

“I thought his endgame  _was_  to kill her. And Alcor. And open the gateway to the Dungeon Dimension, and unleash his true power and wrath on the world, and finally get caught up with Political Intrigue: But With Dragons,” Chris piped up, and Ian pressed the heel of his hand against his right eye.

“Yes, but that’s what he wants you to - Do you remember how we decided the Dungeon Dimension had to be unlocked?”

“With Alcor’s power, yeah.” Zelda tapped her pen against her lip piercing. “That makes sense, that Bael would want to keep Stella alive to use her to persuade Alcor to open the gateway - but then the bottomless pit doesn’t -”

“Sheesh, you guys, are you all brain-dead today?” There was a dull pressure building against Ian’s prosthetic, not quite an ache yet but definitely threatening to become one, and he could swear he caught a whiff of ozone and…margaritas?

Ricardo made a face at Zelda, who sighed. “Sorry, boss, but whatever you were plotting really didn’t come across this time.”

“What? But -” Ian shook his head, blowing out a breath that was halfway to a laugh. “We were all on the same page setting up the season finale! We all knew where this was going, right? It’s  _obvious_.” It was, a series of simple, shining steps to world domination. They’d all brainstormed over Bael, talked his goals and motivation and personality to death - did they really not see - “Stella was never really going to fall in the bottomless pit. That was why Sam got to break through and save her, remember? It was just to show her how little Alcor really cared about her, that he could just let her fall!”

“But he does care about her,” Chris pointed out, and Ian could just strangle the guy with his own trachea, he  _really_  could. “So that’s not going to -”

“It doesn’t matter if Alcor really cares about Stella or not! Jeez, were you paying any attention when we hashed out Bael or were you just taking a nap that day? All he cares about is whether Stella  _thinks_  Alcor cares about her.” Ian leaned forward expectantly, letting out a sigh when the confused faces didn’t instantly morph into looks of realisation. Zelda looked like she might be catching on, but Ian could almost see the wheels spinning uselessly in all of the others’ heads. “Look, fine, I’ll spell it out for you. Stella’s only in this because she thinks Alcor is a good guy, that he’s on her side. Alcor would do just about anything to keep Bael locked up and the world safe, Bael’s not an idiot, he’d know that after Alcor locked him up in the first place. He’s not going to pin all his plans on another demon, even a weirdo like Alcor, being enough of a stupid sap to let him out just so one puny human doesn’t bite it a couple years early.“

He paused for a moment, feeling a hollowness growing under his feet with every note Chris scribbled in his binder and every tap of Zelda’s pen against her lip ring. "But humans are a whole bunch more sentimental, and a lot more gullible. All Bael needs to do is convince Stella that Alcor’s using her, that she can’t trust he’s got her or humanity’s best interests at heart - and Alcor himself will help out with that, he’s not exactly the most forthcoming guy, and he’s been keeping some pretty big secrets - and Stella and her soft, tender little heart will go running straight for somebody she thinks she  _can_ trust. Another human who she already loves, who understands what it’s like to be under a demon’s control - another human who’s  _still_  under a demon’s control, because no matter how powerful love might be or what it might be able to conquer, he still didn’t put a time limit on his contract with Bael. And because of her deal with Alcor -”

“Stella can use Alcor’s powers,” Ricardo said, looking like Ian had just pulled the tablecloth off a fully-set table without spilling a drop from any of the wineglasses.

“Wait, do you mean Sam didn’t actually get control back from Bael in the last episode?” Chris asked, and Ian reached for his coffee mug, only to find it missing. 

“Of course he did, but only because Bael let him. That’s why that line to Alcor about love not conquering all and the code about fine print! Didn’t you -” Ian cut himself off, hearing his own voice very quiet in the suddenly-stifling stillness of the meeting room. “It’s really obvious, isn’t it?”

“Obvious? No way, man!” Ricardo was grinning ear to ear, spinning his pen between his fingers. “Having Bael use Stella to set him free is an awesome idea! The hard part’s gonna be driving that wedge between Stella and Alcor naturally and hinting at Bael being involved so it doesn’t look like it came outta nowhere when the reveal hits, but doesn’t give the game away too soon… That’s evil genius at work, man.”

Ian managed a smile, but it refused to stay on his face for more than half a second.

“Yep. Coffee,” he managed, pushing his chair out from the table and giving it a nasty shove when it caught on the carpet and refused to move. “Keep talking.”

...

Zelda cornered him in the office kitchen, drumming his fingers rhythmically against the counter as he watched the coffeemaker drip erratically into the pot. “Are you…feeling all right?”

Ian stopped drumming. “Hm? Fine! Haven’t had my coffee yet! Eye’s kind of aching, but it does that sometimes! Yup, everything’s peachy, if this coffeepot would just  _hurry up_  -” He slammed a fist against the counter, and the coffeepot shook. “Evil genius. I’m -" 

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, uncurling the fingers of his fist. Zelda was giving him a look that was somewhere between weirded out and seriously alarmed, but there wasn’t a trace of pity or fear in it.

"I’m a jerk,” Ian said, instead of whatever had been running around his head. It took effort to cut the train off, but he managed it. “I should apologise to those guys. Not their fault I didn’t share enough of the plan. I gotta remember that even if this is my show, it’s not just  _my_  show.”

“Yeah,” Zelda agreed, reaching around Ian to grab the carafe and pouring herself a mug of the coffee that must have been brewed earlier that morning. She stirred in a spoonful of whitener, meeting and holding Ian’s gaze. “Look, is something going on? Because that didn’t seem like usual story frustration. And I mean we all know you want it to be perfect, but that sounds like a pretty solid plot to me, so I doubt it’s the problem.”

Ian glanced down at his hand splayed against the counter, then back up at Zelda. “You think? It’s not too obvious?”

Zelda shrugged. “Well, you stumped your own writers, so I think even your famously dedicated fans will have a little trouble with this one if we play it right. Seriously, boss, you gotta cut yourself some slack.” Her voice was heavy with admiration as she said, “I don’t know anybody else who would’ve come up with an idea that makes that much sense and is still such a challenge to figure out, right off the top of his head. It’ll be a really satisfying reveal if we build it up right and get all the pieces in place. We’ll work out how to make it amazing for the show.”

Ian blew out a breath. 

Zelda tapped her spoon against the lip of her mug to shake off a few drips of coffee before dropping the spoon into the sink. “So. You still wanna talk about it, or -”

“Absolutely no way,” Ian said, and watched relief wash over Zelda’s face. “No, I just needed to take a breather. Get some perspective. But thanks. And sorry for calling you all brain-dead.” He somehow managed a smile that didn’t seem forced or too tight. “You’re the best henchmen an evil genius could ask for.”

Zelda’s grin was bright and gleaming. “We do our best. Now come on, you’ve got a bunch of henchmen to apologise to. And we’ve got a secret evil plot to…plot.”

…

The ring was distracting.

Mira kept having to stop in the middle of typing to look at it, the sparkle leaping out and catching her eye. It was strange - it wasn't like she wasn't used to wearing bright, sparkly, eye-catching jewellery. But then again, none of the jewellery she was used to wearing had been an engagement ring.

 _Her_  engagement ring.

Maybe it was normal to not be able to look away from your own engagement ring. Mira wouldn't know. This was the first time she'd ever had one. She was pretty sure, though, that it wasn't normal to feel a little bit sick every time you looked at it.

She forced her eyes back up to the screen. It wasn't like she wasn't happy about it. She was thrilled! Ecstatic, even! Not even a teeny, tiny little bit...nervous. That’d be silly. Because there was nothing to be nervous about! She was marrying the man she’d fallen head over heels in love with, the man who loved everything about her, no matter how silly or unconventional, the one other person she’d trusted with the...stranger side of her life, and who hadn’t run screaming in the other direction when she’d done so, the man who’d literally put out his own eye for her, the man who’d been completely willing to  _die_  for her - 

Nope. Absolutely nothing to be nervous about there.

Mira huffed out a sigh, trying to make her eyes focus on the blinking cursor in front of her. It was almost hypnotic, the little black bar vanishing from existence only to reappear again, and again, and again...

"He's doing it again!"

Mira's strangled scream nearly covered the sound of her chair collapsing to the floor, backwards. Thin air caught her before she slammed into the ground, a soft cushion of nothing that she could feel herself sink, slowing, into for a moment before she hit the point where the air bounced her back upright. She abruptly spun around, fixing Alcor with a glare.

" _What_  did I say about popping up behind me when I'm working?"

Alcor at least had the decency to look sheepish, though it was a little unnerving with his gold-on-black eyes. "Not to. But, Mira -"

"Ah," Mira interrupted, holding up one finger in front of the demon's face.

Alcor let out a breath Mira hadn't seen him take, slouching forward in midair to dangle by the little batwings sticking out of the small of his back.

"Sorry," he muttered, to the gold-tipped toes of his shiny black shoes.

"Apology accepted," Mira said, settling back in her chair. "So what emergency needs my special touch this time?"

“Your boyf-ffffffff _fiancé_. He’s doing the thing.”

It took everything Mira had not to roll her eyes.

“We talked about this,” she said. “Actually, we’ve talked about this, like, multiple times. I’m pretty sure we had an entire giant fight over this. You might remember it? It ended with Ian losing an eye...?”

“That’s not fair,” Alcor grumbled, sinking lower in the air, crossing his arms over his chest and pouting like a little kid. “You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Mira let out a long, slow breath that she had to work hard to keep from turning into an exasperated sigh. “Right, right. You trust Ian. It’s Bill you’re worried about. Et cetera, et cetera - look, would it kill you to just be  _happy_  for me for once?”

She regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth. Mira huffed out another breath, shaking her head and holding up a hand before Alcor could say another word. “No, no, I’m sorry. I know why, and I know that was outta line. I’m just -”

Alcor nodded, and shot Mira a rueful smile. “Yeah. The whole wedding thing’s a little overwhelming, huh?”

“It’s a  _lot_  overwhelming!” Mira slammed both hands down beside the keyboard. “Why is there so  _much_  that needs doing? And why do  _I_  have to do it? Don’t answer that, I know it’s because Ian’s got a major deadline coming up and I was the one who decided we should try and book the Castle on the Hill and have a tea party theme and I know Rosa’s been a huge help and my parents and his parents are  _trying_ to help and we’ve got plenty of time and - !”

She stopped, breathing hard, realising that at some point she’d thrown both hands up in the air. Alcor had sat down cross-legged in midair, leaning his chin in one hand as he watched her rant.

“Okay, I came here to talk to you, but it sounds like you might need to talk more than I do,” he said, when Mira stopped and dropped her arms into her lap. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Mira muttered, glaring down at her ring. “I hate wedding planning.”

“I don’t think there are a lot of people out there who just love it,” Alcor said, reasonably.

“Noooooo,” Mira admitted. “But it’s getting in the way of anything nice I want to do with Ian, and this deadline  _I’ve_  got coming up, and - it just sucks." She huffed out a breath over her top lip, staring at her bangs as they fluttered in the draft, and then turned back to Alcor. “Okay. I think I’ve got it out of my system. Hit me. What’s Ian done now that’s freaking you out?”

Alcor took a deep breath in, opening his mouth wide, and then huffed it back out again, his shoulders drooping as his mouth fell shut again. 

“I just ran what I was about to say through my head before I said it out loud, and it turns out it’s really dumb,” he admitted, and Mira couldn’t help but laugh.

“Well, you could say that about a lot of things you say,” she said, as gently as she could manage, hoping Alcor was picking up on the gentle teasing in her words. 

“Yeah, ha ha ha. Has anyone ever told you that you’re hilarious?” Alcor asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “Because they were definitely lying.”

Mira stuck her tongue out at him. Alcor stuck his out in response, forked end waggling before he tucked it back into his mouth.

“You should keep an eye on Ian, though,” he said, after a moment, a note of seriousness bleeding back into his voice. “I mean, it sounds really dumb to be worried about him because he’s too good at his job - but, just, look out for him? He seemed really upset about this plot twist he planned that none of his writers picked up on, and I don’t think it was just because it was probably too convoluted for Gisnep.”

Mira pressed a hand to her forehead, covering her eyes. “Are you spying on my boyfriend again.”

Alcor’s wings flared. “No! Well. Maybe. A little.” 

“Okay, I see a simple solution to this problem. Step one: don’t spy on my boyfriend.”

“Miraaaaaaaa,” Alcor whined, dragging out Mira’s name. Mira ignored him. 

“Seriously. None of us need this right now. You’re just going to worry yourself into another fit of paranoia and do something that’ll set all of us off and we’ll all end up regretting it. Just don’t even go there, okay?” She turned back to her keyboard, huffing out another breath. “I know you’re going to bring up Area 51 when I say this, but - it’s not gonna kill you to trust him a little.”

Alcor didn’t respond. Mira didn’t look to see whether he was still there, instead turning her attention back to the seating chart. This would be so much easier if she knew whether Mythri was planning to bring a date, or a dragon.

...

"Writing your resume?"

Ian looked up from the drawing table, blinking a little to bring Xander into focus. "Hm? Oh, no, just - drafting. Scripting. Making hilarious jokes that'll probably never see the light of day thanks to Standards & Practices. Idly daydreaming about world domination. You know."

"Artist stuff," Xander agreed, with a grin. "I finished those colour keys for the haunted lumberjack camp, and you're the only other person left in the building. You planning on heading home anytime tonight?"

Ian managed to muster a smile. "Nah, there's a couple jokes here that still need tightening up, some lines I'm not sure about, and this is going to the animators in the morning. I'm just gonna stick around until I'm either sure they're good enough or I'm delirious enough with sleep deprivation that they start looking good to me."

Xander huffed out a laugh, raising a hand in a wave goodbye. "I'll drop by your office and wake you up before your first meeting, then. Night!"

"You're a lifesaver," Ian called after him, as Xander started down the hall.

He stared at the storyboards in front of him until he heard the alarm beep and the door slam behind Xander, the boom of the heavy steel echoing through the empty studio and picking up eerie, off-key harmonics in some corner somewhere. Then Ian sighed, pushing the boards aside.

A little rummaging in his desk drawers (under the piles of Mizar the Magnificent code keys, napkin sketches and notes, fan letters, business cards for people he'd forgotten to call back, hate mail, business cards for people he didn't want to call back, letters from people who really, really wanted him to know about the highly specific sexual things they wanted to do to Stella's pet platypus, and his emergency shaker of chocolate sprinkles) revealed a hard-bound book, rather shabby with age and poor maintenance, labeled MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST.

The book was so old that its maps still showed California as all part of the mainland, and it was written in a dialect that was a slog to wade through even for somebody who read codes quite literally in his sleep, but even though most of its scant number of pages were dedicated to things that really were just myths, it was still one of the best resources he'd found so far. Even the trawl he'd done online (on his work computer, under the pretense of researching demons for MtM) hadn't been able to turn up much information on the supposedly-infamous Bill Cipher.

This might have been because, according to the slim volume in Ian's hands, the demon's 'official' name in the pantheon (pantheon? Demons were beings of chaos and nightmares, spawning and devouring each other throughout eternity, sometimes going dormant for centuries at a time, what single-life-spanned idiot had thought they could catalogue all of them?) was not the incongruously mundane Bill Cipher, but the much fancier-sounding Triangulum. Still sounded stupid and fake to Ian, but whatever.

They said to 'know your enemy'. Ian still wasn't sure who 'they' were, but he had to agree. He'd been researching Cipher ever since Mira had confessed she still had nightmares about what had happened last year. The more he knew, the better he could avoid ending up in situations like - well, like the one he'd ended up in earlier that day. If he knew more about Bill Cipher, more about what he'd been like and how he'd worked and what had made him tick, maybe Ian would've been able to tell if the plot that had fallen together so easily in his thoughts had really just been the product of creative inspiration, hard work, and firsthand observation of the way demons did business, or if it was...

It didn't help that it was impossibly frustrating to research Cipher. And not just because of the scarcity and age of the resources that held even a scrap of actual information about the thousand-year-dead demon, or because Ian had to keep his research a secret from Mira so she wouldn't feel any worse than she already did (there was no hiding anything from Alcor, but he still tried). Because...

Well. If Ian was being honest, because it still felt like he ought to just  _know_. 

Rationally, he knew he shouldn't expect it, but - he still should be able to just reach out and have all the knowledge he needed, right there at his fingertips. He'd always felt that, one way or another, but... Alcor might have taken the memories of the things Bill had known, but he hadn't taken the memory of how it had felt to know them. Sometimes Ian still had dreams about rising above everything, looking down, seeing it all finally slotting together into a perfect pattern below him -

"You can't keep doing this to yourself," Ian muttered angrily to himself, grabbing the sprinkles out of his desk drawer and shaking out a handful. He shoved them into his mouth and slammed the book open before his nerve could fail him, picking back up in the section where he'd found the first mention of Triangulum.


	2. Chapter 2

Mira picked the phone up on the fourth ring, plugging it into the wall port to bring the call up on the TV's screen and toggling the camera to 'off'. She was in no state to be seen by anyone, especially not the photo-perfect Rosa Darling, who had probably never gotten a giant stress zit on her chin in her life.

"Rosaaaaa," she sighed, as Rosa's face appeared huge and bright on the TV screen, beaming like she'd just won the lottery. "What's going on? Are the dress fittings not going well? Oh no, did the dresses not come in? I specifically made sure to order two months ahead of when the bridal websites said to order, but I know I left the fittings too close to the date, I just didn't want anybody's figure changing between the fitting and the wedding and then for the dress not to fit -"

"Calm down, sugarplum," Rosa laughed, cutting Mira off mid-ramble. "Everything's fine, never you fear." A frown creased her forehead, and she asked, "Is there somethin' the matter with your video feed? I see you've got me up, but -"

"Oh, yeah, sorry," Mira lied. "You know what Ian does to electronics. Haven't got it working again since the last time he used it. So what's going on?"

“What, I can’t just give my good friend, the future wife of my best friend, a neighbourly social call?” Rosa asked, teeth blindingly white as she flashed a smile in Mira’s direction. Mira felt her own eyes narrowing in suspicion without her input even before Rosa was halfway through the sentence.

“Not in the middle of wedding planning, you can’t. What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothin’,” Rosa said, the smile not even wavering. “Just thought you sounded a little stressed when I texted you last night, so I figured - what better time for a spa day? Just us girls, masseuses, and mimosas! And you could get your mani-pedi done for the wedding at the same time...” Her smile turned soft, a little pleading, and Mira sighed.

“You need a break, don’t you.”

Rosa’s smile vanished. “I never knew planning a tour could  _be_  so stressful! I’m fixin’ ta scream if I hear one more word from the mouth of some two-left-footed tin-eared square in a three-piece suit! Mira,  _please_.”

Mira huffed out a sigh, but it turned into a laugh without her input about halfway through. “Fine, fine,” she laughed, rolling her eyes. “You twisted my arm. I  _guess_  I could take a break from trying to write these stupid vows for massages and facials, if I  _have_  to.”

Just like that, Rosa’s smile was back, beaming megawatts from the screen. “Great! Just you get your pretty li’l self dolled up, I’ll be over to pick y’all up in an hour.”

Before Mira could say anything, the screen winked off as Rosa hung up. Mira let out a groan, and dropped her head into her hands.

...

Ian opened his eyes, and immediately shut them again.

When he opened his eyes again, though, it was still there. Ian groaned, and leaned his chin against one fist.

"Really?" he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

The little pixel star with wings staring back at him from his tablet screen conspired to look innocent. It would have been doing a pretty good job of it, too, if Ian hadn't caught the eye winking shut in its very centre as he scrolled down the page.

"I know you're still watching," Ian said, idly flicking the winged star with the tip of one finger. "Mind telling me what you're doing spying on me?"

The eye blinked back open in the middle of the symbol, somehow managing to look annoyed even though it was only a handful of pixels high. "Mind telling  _me_  what you're doing researching summoning rituals?" Alcor's voice echoed out of the tablet's speaker, made tinny and small. Ian had to stuff down a grin.

"Mizar the Magnificent stuff. Hey, wanna see the storyboards for the next episode?" he asked, and the little symbol of Alcor on his tablet screen raised an eyebrow that it hadn't had a moment before.

"Would you actually show them to me if I said yes?"

"Probably not," Ian agreed, with as much cheer as he could muster. "How's Mira doing? I didn't make it home last night, these deadlines are killer. You know if I go one second over, Ricky Louse shows up in my nightmares?"

"He can't do that," Alcor said dismissively. "Not since my Flock got their hooves on him." The brow over his eye furrowed deeper. "Weren't you supposed to be helping Mira with the seating charts for the wedding last night?"

Ian sucked in a breath. The symbol of Alcor somehow managed, even without a face, to look smug.

"Oh, noooo," Ian moaned, running both hands through his hair as he leaned back from his desk. "Oh,  _shit_. I completely forgot."

“She’s really stressed about it,” Alcor added, with what Ian thought was unnecessary relish. 

“I am the worst boyfriend,” Ian groaned, letting himself fall forwards until his elbows bumped against the desk. He rested his head in his hands, staring down at his knees. “What can I do to make this up to her?”

“Who’re you talking to?”

Ian jerked his head up. Zelda was standing in the doorway, a hand on her hip and one eyebrow quirked. Ian glanced back down at his tablet, but the symbol of Alcor was back to an innocuous cluster of yellow pixels.

Ian gestured vaguely at his tablet. “Wedding stuff.” He paused, thinking, and then said, “Flowers aren’t gonna make up for forgetting I promised to help Mira with the seating chart last night, are they?”

Zelda gave an exaggerated wince. “Oooh. Nope. Well, maybe if by ‘flowers’ you mean ‘singlehandedly ordering all the flowers for the entire wedding’.”

Ian slapped a hand to his forehead. “I’m an idiot,” he muttered.

“Sure are,” Zelda agreed, a little too chirpily. “Now c’mon, mister idiot genius, we’ve got a meeting with S&P in five and I hear they are  _not_  happy about how you decided to get around not using Alcor’s actual symbol in the show.”

Ian let his head fall slowly back to rest against the back of his chair. “They were the ones who didn’t want me using the real thing!”

“Yeah, but I think just giving it a top hat wasn’t what they had in mind.” Zelda grinned, holding out a hand. “Come on, up you get.”

Ian gave a long-suffering sigh as he levered himself out of the chair. “Fine. But there’d better be coffee.”

...

"Okay, fine," Mira admitted, turning to face Rosa as she pushed open the spa door. "Maybe I did need a break. And yes, the hoverlimo was very cool, but you still didn't have to -"

The rest of her sentence was drowned out in the shout of, "SURPRISE!"

Mira froze in the doorway in horror, staring in at the crowd assembled in the lobby. Four of her sisters, her mother, and Ian’s mother smiled back.

“You lied to me,” Mira muttered to Rosa, through a smile that was more like gritted teeth.

“ ‘Course I didn’t, sugar,” Rosa said, patting Mira’s shoulder condescendingly. “I told you it’d just be us girls, I just didn’t elaborate on which girls I was talkin’ about. Happy bridal shower!”

“You’ve been spending way too much time around Ian,” Mira grumbled, under her breath, before Ian’s mother scooped her up into a hug.

“How  _are_  ya, pumpkin?” She gave Mira a squeeze that all but knocked the air out of Mira, and then stepped back so that Mira’s own mother could get a look at her daughter.

“Parvati sends her regrets, but she’s in the middle of a conference and couldn’t get away,” Mira’s mom said, brushing Mira’s bangs back from her face. “These are getting long, do you have a hair appointment booked?”

“ _Mom,”_  Mira complained, ducking out of her mother’s grasp. 

“Just trying to look out for you! There’s so many things to be organised before a wedding, it’s easy for a little thing like that to slip through the cracks,” Mira’s mom said with a smile. “I’ve brought my wedding jewellery, if you’d like to wear it -”

“And I’ve got a laser wand you can use to take care of that zit,” Aniya interjected. 

Before Mira could say anything, sarcastic or otherwise, she had the air nearly knocked out of her again by a slap on the back. Mythri grabbed her around the shoulders, hugging her one-armed with an enormous grin. “Hey, baby sis! Surprised to see us?”

“You have no idea,” Mira muttered, shooting a glare at Rosa, who beamed innocently back at her.

“I did call your friend Sun-mi, but she’s in Iceland studying elf habitats and won’t be back stateside until the wedding, so it looks like it’s just us!” Rosa clapped her hands together in apparent delight, and Mira had to stuff down the nearly-overwhelming urge to roll her eyes. 

“Yep,” she managed, in a tone that was only slightly sarcastic. “Just the...eight of us.”

“Oh, don’t be such a gloomy-guts,” Hana said, coming up on Mira’s other side and throwing an arm around her shoulders too, over Mythri’s. The two of them started walking towards the spa entrance, and Mira had to stumble along to avoid getting knocked over. “This’ll be fun!”

...

“Mr. Beale. Ms. Asuhtyra. Please take a seat.” One of the censors gestured towards the empty chairs at the very end of the ridiculously long conference table they were seated at the other end of. For a moment, Ian debated the merits of taking one of the chairs and rolling it out of the room and back down the hall to his office. The looks on both censors’ faces told him, however, that this would not be taken in the spirit in which it was intended. Ian sat down in one of the chairs instead, Zelda taking the other.

The censor who hadn’t spoken yet leaned forward across the conference table, folding her hands in front of her. Her expression was open and concerned, her navy-blue blazer and pale pink shirt both impeccably pressed and professional, and Ian was suddenly and absurdly reminded of a therapy session.

“Mr. Beale,” she started, “why is it your intention to lead innocent children down the path of cultism, demon-worship, and eventually to the demolition of the fabric of society as we know it?”

Ian blinked.

...

“So when do you two think you’ll start having kids?”

Mira opened her mouth, but was thankfully spared having to come up with some kind of response to Hana’s question when the masseuse dug the heels of both his hands into her shoulders. “O _oo_ umph.”

“Don’t be - oof - ridiculous,” Mythri all but yelled, from Mira’s other side. “Mira’s a - no, a little lower,  _oh_  yes thanks - she’s a driven career woman, she’s not thinking about popping out any kids any time soon.”

Mira almost thanked her sister, but then Mythri added, “Besides, you’ll have enough trouble finding time for your own work between the unpaid, unacknowledged labour of keeping up a house and propping up your hubby’s creative career, right, kiddo?”

“Mnrgh,” Mira said, pressing her face as hard as she could into the padded ring at the end of the massage table.

...

“Excuse me?” Zelda asked, leaning forward across the conference table as well. “I don’t think either of us have done anything to warrant this kind of accusation.”

“Uh,” Ian said.

“Of course not,” the censor who’d invited them to have a seat interjected smoothly. “But that’s what the parent groups are going to want to know, when they see the unaltered symbol of a very real, very dangerous demon appear on a GisnepXP show.” He glanced sidelong at Ian before adding, “I don’t have to tell you that, while a sense of humour is greatly valued in our cartoon properties, this is no joking matter.”

Ian bit down on his tongue, and wound his hands together under the table, and didn’t say anything.

“I’m sure that  _no one_  needs reminding of that,” Zelda agreed, shooting a pointed glance in Ian’s direction. Ian bit down harder on his tongue.

“Gisnep is trusted by millions of families around the world,” the second censor started, primly, her gaze flicking to Ian's prosthetic eye. “They hold us to the highest of standards for integrity and quality family-focused programming.”

“Okay, but ‘family-focused’ -“ Ian started, and Zelda elbowed him, hard, in the ribs. Ian stifled a sigh, and stopped talking.

...

Mira pulled the tissue paper out of the box and unfolded the garment underneath.

Her first, overwhelming impression was of taupe. Details started to sink in the longer she looked - boxy silhouette, small, structured collar, fake-woodgrain buttons.

"Er," she said. "It's a...coat?"

"It's the Jackie overcoat from Xara," Aniya pointed out, helpfully.

"It definitely is," Mythri agreed. Aniya shot her a dirty look.

"It is  _the_  must-have item for fall," she proclaimed, and then, reaching over to put a hand on Mira's knee, "Look, I know our tastes don't always align, but if you'd like, I'll take you on a shopping trip in the city." Mira assumed, here, that by 'the city' Aniya meant 'New York'. "I'm sure we can fit you up with a sweet pastel wardrobe that's a little more...well, mature. I mean, not that you don't look cute, but...now that you're getting married, you're getting serious about your own life, are you sure that 'cute' is the impression you want to give to the world?"

Mira carefully folded the taupe thing and placed it on the chaisse beside her. 

"Thank you," she added, perfunctorily, after a beat.

...

"And just for the record, slapping a red circle with a line through it over the symbol is not an acceptable method of censoring Alcor's sign either," the first censor said, with a pointed look in Ian's direction, and Ian wished wholeheartedly that he had his sprinkle shaker with him for moral support.

"You could have told me all of this in an email," he pointed out. "Why did you decide we had to meet in person?" He didn't add 'so close to the air date'. It showed, Ian decided, admirable restraint.

The two censors exchanged a look.

"You signed the technology use agreement when you signed on to work at Gisnep," the first censor said.

"Which means you may have no expectation of privacy when using company devices to browse the internet," the second censor chimed in, glancing uncomfortably at Ian's eye again.

The bottom fell out of Ian's stomach so fast he thought, for a moment, that he was riding The Magic Fiefdom's famous Crash Mountain coaster.

"Ian?" Zelda asked, and Ian turned back to the censors to avoid meeting her concerned gaze.

...

"I'm not saying that it isn't worth it," Hana elaborated. "I'm just saying, it isn't easy. And it takes compromise." She rolled her eyes. "A loooot of compromise, sometimes. You gotta keep reminding yourself why you love this person."

"Mm," Mira agreed, staring down at the little bot that was pressing purple rhinestones into the pearlescent white polish on her toenails.

Mira's mother nodded. "I remember the first few years with your father," she said, drily. 

"Finn didn't know how to use a washing machine when we got married," Hana agreed. "I mean, a  _washing_  machine!"

"Rantej still leaves his dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor," Mira's mom said, still nodding along. "Once, I stopped picking them up and washing them to see if he'd notice. When he ran out of socks...he went out and bought a new pack."

Hana, Priya, and Mythri all let out a simultaneous groan, and Aniya sniffed.

"This is why I'm not married."

The bot attending to Mira's toes beeped a cheery little tune, indicating that it was finished, and then extended a silvery rod from its middle and proceeded to gently blow warm air onto Mira's toes.

...

"I do need to research demonology for the show," Ian said, as mildly as he could manage, trying not to let his voice shake. "I'm sure I don't need to tell you how dangerous it could be if I misrepresented a demon in a piece of popular media with a very, very..." He considered his words for a moment, before settling on "... _enthusiastic_ fanbase _._ "

"A danger which could be easily avoided by not featuring demons on a children's television show," the second censor said, a little too sharply. She wasn't even trying to hide that she was staring at his prosthetic eye, now, and Ian felt a vague wave of irritation rush over him.

"It's pretty difficult to tell someone to be careful about something if you can't give them any information at all about what it is or how it works," he shot back. 

Thankfully, Zelda raised a hand to interrupt before it could turn into an argument. "Does this have to do with the introduction of Bael? I know he's been a surprise favourite with the fanbase, but -"

"It has more to do with Mr. Beale's fascination with a certain demon that was presumed dead as of the Transcendence," the first censor said, almost regretfully. "A demon that bears a more than passing resemblance to your Bael. I'm certain no one here  _intends_  to be responsible for the resurrection of Bill Cipher, but -"

Ian had to lean his face into one hand to make clapping his hand over his mouth to stifle the snort of laughter look nonchalant.

"Is something funny, Mr. Beale?" the second censor asked, her voice icy enough to keep food fresh for weeks.

Ian waved his free hand dismissively. The second censor's eyes narrowed, but she didn't say anything. 

Instead, she unfolded and refolded her hands in front of her, clearly composing herself. "This meeting is a courtesy to you, Mr. Beale. Whatever your intentions, we hope you will be aware, when making creative decisions in the future, of Gisnep's stance on...these matters. Your...personal interests should remain in the realm of your personal life."

"Got it. I will make sure to remove any and all references to fiddle music from Mizar the Magnificent," Ian said, around his hand. Zelda elbowed him in the ribs again.

"Again," the first censor sighed, "I assume no one here needs to be reminded that this is no joking matter."

Ian drew in a long breath, and then let it out again, slowly, wishing once more that his trusty shaker of chocolate sprinkles would fit in his back pocket for occasions like this one.

...

"I'm guessing you've got a dress all picked out, this close to the date," Ian's mother said. After all the husband horror stories, Mira latched onto the conversational thread like a lifeline.

"Yeah, actually - just a second." She pulled out her phone, flipping through screenshots until she found the one she wanted and holding it out for Ian's mother to see. "Angelic Petti released the Moon Dream Lapin Nuptials collection this year, I had to take a vacation day from work so I could camp out on the webpage and place an order as soon as they opened up preorders - but isn't it perfect?"

"You bought a dress?" Mira's mom said, and even though she was smiling, Mira's heart slowly sank at the tone in her voice.

"Yes, and it's perfect," she said, with what she hoped was a note of finality.

"You didn't need to do that," Priya said. "I've still got great-grandmother's saree from when I matriculated, you could -"

Mira's smile was starting to feel frayed around the edges, but she held it in place as she shook her head. "You're so much taller than me, and I wouldn't dare try to hem all that gold trim."

Mira's mother pressed both lips together. "That's a shame. Your father would have loved to see you in it. You know one -"

"One woman from every generation of his family since great-grandmother has worn that saree at her wedding, yes, I did know that," Mira said, through gritted teeth. "I've already paid for this preorder -"

Hana, peering over Mira's shoulder at her phone and the screenshot of the dress, sucked in a sharp breath. "Not that it's not...adorable," she said, "but please tell me you didn't pay  _that much_  for it."

Mira drew in a deep breath, and then let it out slowly, deciding she wouldn’t tell them about the shopping service and shipping fees. Or the taxes.

“This is the dress that I want to wear for my special, once-in-a-lifetime day when I marry the man I love,” she said, through gritted teeth, before turning to Rosa. “You said you had dinner planned too? I’m feeling pretty hungry.” She did not add that she was also feeling a strong and desperate need for a glass of something bright pink and very alcoholic. 

“Sheesh, okay, bridezilla,” Mythri muttered, and Mira had to shut her eyes.

Rosa clapped her hands together. “Dinner! Yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea.” She slung an arm around Mira’s shoulders, muttering, “I am  _so_  sorry,” into Mira’s ear as she started to lead Mira towards the spa doors. “Hoverlimo’s this way!”

“Just please tell me you didn’t also plan me a surprise bachelorette,” Mira muttered back.

Rosa’s silence told her all she needed to know.

...

"So correct me if I'm wrong," Ian started, "but your concern is over us...glorifying demons and demonic worship in our television show all about how dangerous and ultimately harmful summoning demons always is? And of us accidentally resurrecting a cult that worships a demon who's been dead a thousand years by showing him as a pun-obsessed, annoying jerk antagonist in a children's cartoon, who takes advantage of and ruins the lives of everyone who tries to summon him?"

The two censors exchanged another look.

"Well, yes," the first censor said, finally. 

Ian nodded.

"Good to see we're on the same page, then," he said, pushing his chair back from the table. 

"Mr. Beale -" the second censor started, but Ian cut her off with a look.

"We're hitting the crunch here before we go back to air, and I'm personally vetting all the episode scripts, so unless you had something else to add, I have a billion other things I need to be doing right now," he said. "Unless you want to delay the new episodes? I mean, your call. I'm sure the executives will understand about the lost ratings and revenue."

The second censor opened her mouth, then closed it.

"No, that - that was everything," she managed. "Please have the new symbol designs in to us by ten o'clock tomorrow morning for approval."

"Great," Ian said, turning and starting to take a step towards the door. He stopped and spun back on his heel to face the censors, though, one hand raised with his index finger pointed at the ceiling.

"Actually, there is one more thing," he said, as Zelda got up from the table to follow him. "I've been researching Cipher  _because_  he's so similar to Bael. Thought it was worth it to make sure I didn't use any of Cipher's real, unaltered symbols or powers and  _accidentally_  resurrect him or his cult." His own smile felt a little too strained, too wide, his prosthetic eye sitting uncomfortably in its socket at the unfamiliar stretch to his face. "Trust me, if I ever resurrect Bill Cipher, it's going to be on purpose."

...

The apartment door slammed with a satisfying finality behind Ian, and he kicked his shoes off with more force than strictly necessary, one colliding with the wall and leaving a black streak. Ian sighed, kneeling down to scrub at it with his thumb until it came off. 

“I have had  _the_  worst day,” he complained, as he stomped out into the living room. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to replace me with Rachel Spice and we’re going to have to move into a cardboard box under an overpass and live on rainwater and napkins -”

He stopped. 

Mira was sitting slumped down on the couch. At least, Ian was pretty sure it was Mira. It was hard to tell behind the five feet of tulle standing up in the air between them.

“Is that...every petticoat you own?” he asked, looking at the bare brown legs sticking out of the pile of cotton-candy-coloured floof. The toenails of the feet propped against the coffee table were each painted a pretty opal colour, he noticed, with a single purple rhinestone decorating each.

“Mmhm,” Mira hummed, from somewhere behind the petticoat barricade.

“Why are you wearing all of your petticoats at once?” Ian asked, carefully, resisting the urge to gently brush his finger down the sole of one of Mira’s feet to hear her shriek. That hadn’t sounded like a happy ‘mmhm’. 

Mira’s next words just confirmed Ian’s suspicions. “I thought it would make me feel better.” There was a pause, and then Mira added, unnecessarily, “It didn’t.”

“Oh, starshine,” Ian sighed, deliberating for a moment before plopping down on the couch beside his girlfriend, and the petticoat monster slowly devouring his girlfriend. “What's the matter?”

Mira’s arms were crossed over her chest, she was slouched down as far as she could go without sliding right off the couch, and she was pouting. And worse, she was trying to pretend she wasn’t pouting. So this wasn’t a ‘sad kitten eyes trying to get something’ situation. Ian was suddenly and forcibly reminded of his conversation with Alcor, earlier, the one that had all but been driven out of his head by his horrible meeting with S&P. “Oh, Mira, shit, I am so sorry. I really meant to be here last night to help with the seating chart, but things got crazy at work and I had so many things I had to finish and I completely forgot -”

“Let’s not do it.”

Ian blinked. “What?”

Mira turned her face towards Ian, the light catching two shiny streaks down her cheeks as she moved. “I said let’s not do it. The whole...wedding thing.”

Ian swallowed, hard, his heart giving an unpleasant lurch in his chest.

“Okay,” he managed, at last, his mouth dry, his prosthetic eye throbbing in its socket. “Okay, if that’s what you want -”

“Let’s just not get married and keep living together like a couple of weird roommates who’re also in love with each other forever,” Mira continued, and Ian let out a long breath, feeling his fingers shaking. “Weddings are dumb and stupid and I can’t believe I ever wanted one in the first place and I hate them.” She must have kicked her feet, because the petticoat avalanche fluttered. 

“What? No, you don’t, you were so excited about planning this - what about the tea party at the Castle on the Hill? That’s not dumb, that’s -”

“Cancelled,” Mira said, flatly turning back to stare at her petticoats. “I got back from the  _worst_  surprise bridal shower  _ever_  and I’ve got two missed calls and one of them is from the venue saying they overbooked by accident and can we push our wedding to July of next year and one of them is from the bridal shop saying they have  _lost_  my _entire order of bridesmaid dresses_  and I  _hate_  this and weddings are  _dumb!”_  She punctuated this with another furious kick of her feet, her face screwing up like she was trying not to cry.

Ian opened his mouth to tell her that weddings weren’t dumb or stupid and that she wasn’t dumb for wanting one, that if she really didn’t want one anymore then that was fine but if she did still want one then they should have one, that he’d help, that he’d make sure she didn’t have to do all of the hard work and planning on her own, that they’d make certain it would be beautiful and fun and wonderfully imperfect together. But instead of any of that, what came out of his mouth were two words. “Let’s elope.”

Mira stared at Ian as though he’d told her she had a duck on her head. 

“Let’s elope,” Ian repeated, liking the idea more with every passing second. “Forget the wedding. Forget the venue and the seating chart and the bridesmaid dresses. We'll go somewhere neither of us have been, do the ceremony, have our honeymoon, and be back for work on Monday, married."

Mira put her head on one side like she was seriously considering it.

"We can still read the vows we wrote, right?" she asked, and Ian pressed his lips together, forcing a smile.

"Definitely, if that's what you want," he said, trying to push the files and files of discarded drafts stored on his tablet out of his mind. "Where’s somewhere in the country that you’ve always wanted to go?”

Mira was still staring at him like she was trying to read his thoughts printed on his forehead, but her eyes narrowed, that steely glint of determination that Ian liked so much settling in behind them. “The cat cafe in Austin?”

Ian considered it for a minute. “Maybe somewhere where they wouldn’t ask us to buy pastries before we could get married there? I was thinking a little more public, like..." He realised how silly the words sounded even as they came out of his mouth. “The Extraterrestrial Highway in Nevada?”

Mira pursed up her lips and put her head to one side like she was considering it. “I think that would be dusty. And hard to get a JP all the way out there.” She tapped a finger against her chin thoughtfully. “What about Niagara Falls?”

“Too busy,” Ian said. “Want tourists in all of our wedding photos?”

Mira shuddered.

“Hm,” she said. “Where’s somewhere in this country, that’s out in the open, cute and fun, and touristy enough that they’ll let us get married there but not so touristy that it’ll be crowded and miserable, that’s also weird enough for both of us?”

She looked up in sudden realisation, her eyes meeting Ian’s, and a smile broke across her face as they both said in near-perfect unison, “Gravity Falls!”

...

Several hundred miles north, in the heart of a forest, the bucket of an excavator bit into dirt and sank down, deeper than the worker operating it expected it to go. She pulled the bucket up, and the ground came with it, revealing a hole sloping down, cutting deep into the bedrock. From where the excavator was parked, the operator couldn’t see more than rock walls, leading down a few feet before they disappeared into darkness.

And, for just an instant, from the depths of the cave she seemed to have uncovered, a flicker of gold.


	3. Chapter 3

In the Mindscape, something stirred.

Dipper felt the ripples, less like a water droplet landing in a still pond and more like the aftershocks of an earthquake. He stopped in the middle of seeding a particularly good Ghost of Presidents' Day Past nightmare in the mind of a slumbering corrupt public official, and listened, hard.

The ripples died away, slowly, to a faint tremor and then only a dissatisfied grumbling. But something had changed - something had shifted. The tenor of the Mindscape had modulated to a different key. And by the sounds of things, that key was minor.

Dipper groaned, and twisted together the ends of the dream, leaving it on a cliffhanger with a heavily-implied 'to be continued'. He'd be back the next night to give the lady Presidents' Days Present and Future and work the moral in there. Probably. Unless whatever had caused the ripples was more interesting, or he forgot.

It took some tracking to locate the source of the ripples - they'd all but died away by the time Dipper started to look, and there were enough echoes and distortions around the Pacific coast what with all the pockets of residual demonic energy that were still hanging around even a full millennium after he'd destroyed half the coastline, it was like California itself was holding a grudge - but eventually, Dipper managed to narrow down the epicentre to a few square miles.

And groaned, again.

He knew exactly where the ripple had started. Because, of course, right smack-dab in the middle of those few square miles was the town of Gravity Falls.

"How is it that, even after the entire world gets turned into a museum of the weird, this is still the weirdest place in it?" Dipper asked the town at large.

Gravity Falls, obviously, didn't answer, sitting innocuously quiet and cheerful in the summer sun.

A metaphysical tug pulled Dipper's attention away from the town before he could spend too much time staring at it and reflecting on one of the few secrets of the universe he still, for all his omniscience, hadn't managed to crack. Mira was calling, with apparently impeccable timing.

"What's up?" Dipper asked, popping into Mira's living room. Mira was beaming head to toe, wearing what looked like every petticoat she owned, and holding Ian's hand with the hand that wasn't waving a bag of candy-coated chocolate-covered peanuts. 

"Guess what? We're moving this wedding to Gravity Falls! Like, right now. As in we are eloping. Candy-coated peanuts in exchange for a little help getting there?" She gave the bag another wave.

Dipper looked from Mira, to Ian, and back to Mira again.

"You're kidding me, right?" he asked, finally.

Mira glanced over at Ian, both of their smiles slipping slightly.

"Oh no," she said, her voice dropping. " _Now_ what?"

"Okay, I'm putting Niagara back on the table," Ian said. "The tourists aren't as bad after the summer season...or we could take the rebooking the Castle on the Hill offered us, and that'll give us time to find that shipment of bridesmaid dresses -"

"No," Mira said, not looking away from Dipper’s face. “What’s going on, Alcor? I thought you'd be happy we'd picked somewhere that was so important to you." Her voice was too sweet, her smile too tight. Dipper had to stuff down a shudder.

“I...actually don’t know yet,” he admitted. He scowled at the way Mira rolled her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey, a random magic ripple came out of there not five minutes ago! The whole Mindscape’s still humming! And then you summon me up and want to go there?  _Something_  is weird here.”

Mira's eyes narrowed, and Dipper had to resist the sudden and almost overpowering urge to look over at Ian.

"Yeah, I'm actually with the literal demon on this one," Ian said, finally giving Dipper an excuse to turn in his direction. "No offence, but last time we got mixed up with mysterious forces beyond our comprehension..." He finished the sentence by waving one hand vaguely in the direction of his prosthetic eye.

Mira sucked in a long breath, her expression terrible, and then slowly let it out again.

"Can you find out what this magic ripple was?" she asked, her voice the particular kind of tight of a very angry person trying to be calm and rational.

"Probably, but it might take a little while," Dipper answered, honestly.

"Great. How about an overbooking at our venue? Can you fix that? And find my lost order of bridesmaid dresses? And while you're at it, do you want to finish our seating chart? Please bear in mind that I'm pretty sure one of Ian's relatives may actually drop dead if she gets startled or touched by a cool breeze, and that my sister is planning on bringing an actual baby Chinese Fireball as her plus one." Mira set the bag of candy-coated peanuts down on the couch behind her, ticking off things on her fingers as she listed them. "Oh, and we still need to sort out whether or not Grandmother is coming and whether or not she's bringing her boyfriend, and whether he's bringing _his_ boyfriend, and get the rest of the invitees who haven't RSVP'd to get on that so we can get numbers and any food sensitivities to the caterer so that we know how much we're going to have to pay them so we can decide how much budget we have left for flowers -"

"All right, I get it!" Dipper interrupted, and Mira sucked in another long breath, this time less like she was trying to keep her patience and more like she was trying to catch her breath. "Seriously, I get it, this wedding planning stuff sounds like a nightmare. But can't you, I don't know, just go down the street to the JP and get it done this afternoon?"

Mira slowly sank down onto the couch, her pile of petticoats enveloping her and the bag of candy-coated peanuts.

"Yeah," she muttered, from somewhere within the cloud of tulle. "I guess so." Even if Dipper hadn't been able to see and feel the soggy concrete-coloured blanket that fell over her aura, the defeat was obvious in her voice.

Ian shot Dipper a helpless look, and Dipper winced in sympathy. 

"Look, give me twenty-four hours," Dipper finally said, making up his mind. "I'll figure out what's going on in Gravity Falls and whether or not it's safe for you guys to go up there. And if it's not, or if I can't..."

He sucked in a deep breath he didn't really need, feeling lungs he hadn't had a second before inflate. "Then I'll help you with your - ugh - seating chart."

...

Gravity Falls was nothing like Dipper remembered it, and yet, somehow, it was exactly the same.

Oh, on the surface it had changed a lot over the years. The forest had grown up, and been cut back; businesses and families had come and gone; a city had sprung up around the protective magical bubble surrounding the site of the world’s greatest magical disaster, and then withered away again as magic became more commonplace, its birthplace protected by a national park. Generations had come and gone, each leaving its small but significant mark. The statue of Nathaniel Northwest had been pulled down and replaced by, of all things, a buffalo.

But the UFO-shaped hole in the cliffs still loomed over the town, protectively cupped in its little hollow. The five-times-great-grandchildren of the Manotaurs Dipper had met on his and Mabel’s first summer there still roamed the mountainside, challenging unwary travellers to arm-wrestling competitions and antagonising the Multibear. The gnomes still migrated underground every winter, only to emerge, freshly energized and doubly annoying, every spring. Dinosaurs still slumbered, encased in ancient sap, beneath the townsfolk’s very feet. _Some_ thing still lurked in the lake, dropping the occasional enormous tooth or eyelash to wash up on the shore. 

But more than anything, Gravity Falls had still somehow kept its sense of mystery. Dipper Pines had been a demon for a little over a millennium, now. He’d survived having his puny human skull cracked open and the whole universe crammed inside. He’d had a little more than a thousand years of experience of the world. He rarely, if ever, got infodumps anymore, because he’d grown into his near-omniscience, learned how to handle and harness it. Very little remained hidden from him anymore, and even less shocked him.

And yet, every time he arrived in Gravity Falls, it still felt like the first time. Like there was something bigger going on than even he knew, something hidden, like he was only glimpsing the very nearest curve of something impossibly vast and mostly buried. That same old, familiar thrill of stumbling over a mystery that had been hidden in plain sight all along.

And, even a full thousand years since magic had become mundane, Gravity Falls still kept its mysteries closely guarded.

Dipper popped into the Stanley Pines Memorial Library of the Supernatural first, in its airy, sleek new building at the edge of town. He’d lost track of how many new buildings the Library had had since it had finally had to be moved out of the crumbling Mystery Shack several centuries ago, but this one was still pretty new, less than a hundred years old. There were still a few people living in Gravity Falls who could trace their family history back to Willow Pines, but only one of them still worked at the Library, and none of them could still see Dipper if he didn’t want to be seen.

He concentrated for a moment on perfecting his ‘Tyrone Pines’ disguise before venturing out of the basement stacks, climbing the stairs and shooting the reference librarian on duty his most charming grin. Too late, he remembered to make sure his teeth were appropriately blunted. It hadn’t been fashionable to wear fangs for at least three decades. If he got caught out because of a fashion faux pas, Mira’d never let him live it down.

“Hey,” he said, strolling up to the reference desk as casually as he could. Did people still use ‘hey’ as a greeting? Dipper couldn’t remember. “How’s your afternoon going?”

The reference librarian smiled toothily at Dipper, and that was when he realised she was a hologram. He was talking to a customer service AI. Well, great. She probably wasn’t going to have the gossip he was really there for.

“It is a pleasant afternoon,” the AI agreed. “Is there some information I can help you look up? A book or resource you’re looking for?”

Dipper considered for a moment. “Is there any social media chatter about any recent, strange phenomena in Gravity Falls?” He thought about it for another moment, before adding, “Strange by Gravity Falls terms, that is. And - only within the last day.”

The reference librarian beamed, literally, the holopixels in her teeth emitting a fraction more light than before. Her expression went a little still for a moment, before she blinked and said, “Nope! If you’d like, I can expand your parameters and do another search.”

Dipper managed not to sigh. That was pretty much what he’d been expecting. “Sure, all right. Give me anything out of the ordinary in Gravity Falls in the last week.”

The reference librarian went still again, her smile glowing a perfect white. It glowed, and glowed, and glowed, until it got hard for Dipper to look at with his jelly-filled human eyeballs. The reference librarian blinked, and then blinked again, and again, the blinks speeding up until her eyes were a blur, her head beginning to twitch spasmodically back and forth - 

“Oh no no no,” a voice said from behind Dipper, and he stepped out of the way for the harried-looking young person who ran up and leaned over the desk, toggling a switch behind the desk back and forth. “What did you ask her?”

Feeling a little sheepish, Dipper said, “Uh, for anything out of the ordinary in Gravity Falls in the last week...?”

The young person fixed Dipper with a stare that clearly said they thought he was as stupid as he felt just then. “Well, that’d be why she overloaded, yep,” they said, hopping up and vaulting over the reference desk to land beside the frozen hologram, still flickering with glitch. They knelt down so that Dipper could only see the top of their head over the desk, shaved almost bald and with what looked like a metal mohawk glittering with tiny LEDs sticking out of it. “What were you doing asking for something like _that_?”

They must have pressed some button or crossed some wire, because the hologram jerked, the top of its head and the middle of its torso stretching away in opposite directions, turned abruptly into a tall, attractive man, then into a small bowl of petunias, and then vanished. The person with the metal mohawk re-emerged from behind the desk, breathing hard and not looking particularly impressed, to give Dipper a searching look. “You’re a new face around here.”

“Tyrone Pines,” Dipper said, extending a hand. Metal mohawk looked down at it like they were trying to work out whether it was likely to explode. Dipper tucked the hand back down at his side, feeling self-conscious. “Our instruments picked up an unusual surge of magic from somewhere in this area about half an hour ago, and I’m trying to figure out what might have caused it. Have you seen or heard about anything out of the ordinary for Gravity Falls occurring recently?”

Metal mohawk looked Dipper up and down. “You’re a little young to be a researcher, aren’t you?”

“Grad student,” Dipper lied. “And I’m older than I look.” At least _that_  wasn’t a lie. “ _And_  I might be missing out on the opportunity of my academic career here, so...can you help me out?”

Metal mohawk gave Dipper another long, searching look before saying, “Don’t they still teach you guys how to effectively use search engines in undergrad? AI’s come a long way, but processing power still costs money, y’know.”

“I just didn’t think,” Dipper ground out, the tips of his manufactured ears burning. He barely resisted the urge to check and make sure they hadn’t gone pointy on him. “Figured she’d have a filter for Gravity Falls background weirdness radiation.”

Metal mohawk shook their head. “How would anyone ever decide what was significant and what was ‘background weirdness radiation’? In _Gravity Falls_? Do _you_  want to try coding that nightmare?” They took a deep breath, visibly composing themselves, and ran a hand down one shaved side of their skull. “What you’re looking for, basically, is gossip. Am I right?”

“You’re not wrong,” Dipper admitted. 

“Sorry,” metal mohawk said, not sounding particularly sorry. “I’m not real big on gossip.” Their LEDs all flashed once, in unison, and they said, like they were just remembering, “I do know they’re just breaking ground up by the cliffs to put in one of those awful hovervator tour centres. With the glass floors? Maybe they dug something up, people are always finding weird buried crap around here.”

“By the cliffs?” Dipper asked, a sinking feeling burrowing into the pit of his stomach for no reason he could explain and making itself at home there.

“Yeah, just at the base there. Apparently it’s a great launch platform for the hovervator cars.” Metal mohawk’s face split in a vicious smile. “Wonder what they’ve decided to do about the wonky magnetic fields up there, though. Last I heard, the company the state hired to put the thing in was six weeks behind schedule trying to figure out how to get the cars out over the valley without them falling out of the sky.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Dipper said, thinking of the UFO buried in the middle of the valley with a shudder.

Metal mohawk shrugged one shoulder. “Well, maybe if they did dig up something of magical significance, they’ll have to abandon the project, or move it somewhere else. Anything that might be part of the world’s magical heritage is super protected as part of the park, you know.” They paused, pointing one finger at Dipper. He noticed, vaguely, that their nails were all painted silver - or maybe covered in some kind of silvertoned metal plating. “Which means you and your prof are going to need alllllll kinds of clearance and paperwork if you want to remove anything for study. Don’t go getting any big ideas.”

“Definitely won’t,” Dipper agreed, with a nod. “Thanks, I think I’ll head up that way and check it out.”

“Don’t mention it,” metal mohawk said. “Oh, and if you ever short-circuit my reference librarian like this again, I’m going to personally find you and make you reboot her yourself.”

...

Dipper stepped out of the Library, and took a long, deep breath. The air seemed somehow fresher here, less tainted with smog than New California and faintly scented with pine and petrichor. Somewhere off in the trees, there was a warbling of birdsong and the firecracker rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker. The sun beamed down hot and crystal-bright, warming Dipper's fleshsack from the outside in.

He'd really forgotten what it was like to be physical - not just present in the physical plane, but inhabiting a body, tailor-made to his specifications, for no other reason than to be in a body. It was...nice. Maybe just in small ways, but they were small ways he definitely hadn't appreciated enough when he'd had a meat body full-time. Dipper wondered, vaguely, whether he'd be in town long enough to justify getting a meal. A memory of Greasy's pancake stacks drifted to the surface of his thoughts, and Dipper gave himself a moment to mourn for things lost to the passage of time. Say what you liked about the rest of the food at Greasy's Diner, they'd made really good pancakes.

It was a nice day, Dipper decided, at last. He hadn't taken the time to human properly in...a while. He didn't want to get out of practice and forget how. The hike up to the cliffs would be just the thing to enjoy the fresh air and the sunshine, and the hike back would be just the thing to work up an appetite.

He managed to get to the other side of town before giving up and teleporting himself up to the foot of the cliffs. That was another thing he'd forgotten about flesh bodies - how quickly they wore out.

"How does anyone get anything done with these noodle limbs?" Dipper complained to no one in particular as he rematerialized, just on the inside of a fence made of bright orange plastic netting.

"Hey! You! This is a private work site!" 

Dipper looked up, to see a woman built like a bear crossed with a monster truck bearing down on him, her expression thunderous under her scuffed yellow hard hat. "How'd you get in here? Where's your PPE?" she demanded, pulling to an abrupt stop only inches away from Dipper.

Dipper gulped nervously, and a bright orange hard hat popped into existence on his head.

The woman's eyes flicked up to it, and narrowed. "Damn wizards," she grumbled, turning away from Dipper. "Bet you dollars to donuts that thing's not up to international standards. _Or_ rated for heavy construction." She started to walk away, turning and spinning when she realised Dipper wasn't behind her. "Well? It's this way."

Dipper weighed his options for a moment, and then followed her.

"We'll just need you to sign off that it's a natural formation, that it's nothing to do with the Transcendence," the woman said, as she led Dipper through torn-up dirt and between flags planted in the exposed earth, ducking under the extended arm of an enormous earthmover. "Damn national parks, damn Preservation of Magical Heritage act - this is, without a doubt, the most godawful jobsite I've ever worked on, and that's saying something."

"Is it, though?" Dipper asked. "Like, really?"

The woman snorted.

"Maybe in your line of work, it's normal for the trees to get up and start wandering around." She slowed, and then stopped, in front of a dark, gaping hole half-buried in the ground, half-sunk into the cliff face. "Well, here we are. A hole in a rock. You gonna sign off on this for me, or d'you wanna try to argue that it's somehow magically significant?"

Dipper walked closer to the cave, and then stopped.

Even before he could see anything, he felt it. That deep, constant thrumming, that minor note in the chord of the world - whatever it was, it was coming from somewhere inside the black hole before him. A breath of cold, stale air wafted out of it, smelling of dry earth and ages, and Dipper had to fight down the crawling feeling that the cave was _breathing_.

Dipper coughed, suddenly stricken by the overwhelming sensation that he was suffocating.

"I'll - I'll need to take a closer look," he managed, between coughs.

Beside him, the woman let out a heavy sigh. "We'll have to get some people in there to shore it up, make sure it doesn't collapse -"

"No, no," Dipper interrupted. "I'm a...wizard. It's fine."

The woman gave him a skeptical look, but she didn't push him.

Dipper conjured up a handful of soft white light with a thought, raising it over his head as he ventured closer to the cave. The light illuminated only a foot or so of the rock lining the walls, a sloped floor worn smooth leading down into the impenetrable dark. The feeling, the magic, whatever it was, pressed around and against Dipper like quicksand, flowing sluggishly but bleeding into everything until it was nearly impossible to move, to breathe. Dipper could feel his aura prickling on contact with the strange magic, bristling protectively around him.

"There's...definitely something magic here," he said, and the woman groaned, pinching her nose between thumb and forefinger. "I'm just not sure what it is, yet."

"Well, get in there and find out!" the woman snapped. Dipper raised both hands placatingly, and started forward into the dark.

The cave mouth led into a long, winding tunnel, carved into the rock of the cliffs. It looked ancient. It felt ancient. It _smelled_  ancient, the earthy smell of the living rock around him clashing with the musty, stale smell of unused attics and basements, museum display cases, old sealed trunks full of relics from a great-great-something-or-other. This place wasn't related to the Transcendence, Dipper was sure, and he only got more sure the farther he ventured in, leaving daylight and the fresh air and the woman behind. It was much, much older than that.

It also reeked of magic, that slow, sliding, suffocating flood of primordial power that had assaulted Dipper back on the surface. The deeper he went into the cave, the more it seemed to resist him, like he was wading through molasses with every step.

But that wasn't all. The deeper he went, the more that magic started to feel...familiar. And not just the magic. Something like déjà vu washed over him as he turned around a bend, and his handful of light illuminated a natural doorway, the tunnel widening out into a larger chamber in the rock. The chamber beyond was still in shadow, Dipper's light not quite strong enough to reach its far walls, but that didn't matter. The magic surrounding him pressed on him like a physical force, but that wasn't what stopped Dipper in his tracks.

He knew what he'd find once he passed through that doorway. Knew it just as surely as he could feel its magic pushing against him.

Saw it as clearly as he could see the red markings on the cave walls.

...

In general, Ian didn't mind waiting.

Anything you cared about was, after all, worth getting right. And getting things right took time. So sometimes you didn't get what you wanted right away. So what? Still, eventually, you got what you wanted. No, so long as what he was waiting for was something good, Ian didn't mind a bit of a wait.

What he _did_ mind was being helpless. 

There wasn't anything he could do about whatever was going on in Gravity Falls. And sitting and worrying about whether the idea to visit there had truly been his, or if there were other, sinister forces at play, really, _really_ wasn't the way he wanted to spend the rest of his day. It was ironic, really. He'd been trying to get Alcor off his back for nearly a month, but now that the demon was actually gone, all Ian wanted was for him to hurry up and get back.

He was idly doodling on his tablet screen, having given up on actually trying to do productive work on MtM or on his vows (why was it so impossibly difficult to find the right words to say 'I love you and I literally put my eye out for you, I'm in this for the long haul'?), when Alcor blipped into existence in the middle of the living room. His face was twisted, like he'd smelled something bad, and Ian looked down at his tablet again, only to see he'd covered the entire screen in triangles of all shapes and sizes. Groaning, he closed the file without saving, putting the tablet aside.

"So what's the damage?" he asked Alcor, who gave a little shudder before answering.

"Well, the good news is that it's nothing new," he said, with a wince, and Ian braced himself for the bad news. "Actually, it's really old. They're putting a new tourist attraction in by the cliffs and the excavation opened up a cave that was used for some kind of rituals by Gravity Falls' native people before the Transcendence." 

"Okay," Mira said slowly, and Ian could tell that, like him, she was trying to figure out what the bad news was. "That doesn't sound so bad -"

"They were rituals to summon Bill Cipher."

Ian groaned, and pressed a hand over his prosthetic eye, dragging it slowly down his face.

" _And_ to banish him," Alcor pushed on, relentless. "He used to have a cult there, but it looks like they wised up to what he was up to when he tried to get them to open him a portal into our world from his Nightmare Realm. Nobody's used that cave or those rituals for something like a thousand and thirty years. I think the leftover magic just got disturbed when it was unsealed."

"So what does that mean for us?" Mira said, a little too sharply. Alcor shrugged one shoulder in a surprisingly human gesture.

"It might just be a coincidence. Or you might've subconsciously picked up on the residual energy from the summoning rituals. Either way, it's...probably not a trap." Alcor shifted uncomfortably in midair, his wings twitching.

"But you think it is anyway," Mira said, thankfully voicing Ian's thoughts for him. He shot her a grateful smile, but she didn't turn to look in his direction, her gaze still fixed on Alcor.

Alcor's wings gave a nervous flutter.

"I don't know if it's a good idea for you guys to go up there," he said. "I mean, residual magic's still magic. And Bill was smart, and tricky -"

"We're going."

The words seemed to fall out of Ian's mouth without his having to push them. Adrenaline made the tips of his fingers a little numb, his lips clumsy, but the words came out crystal clear. Alcor turned to look at him, and so did Mira, a flicker of fear flashing across her eyes for a second before resolve replaced it.

"Are you sure?" Alcor started, and Mira cut him off, pressing a hand against his chest when he started to drift towards the couch.

"If Ian's okay with it, then yes. Let's get this show on the road!" Her bright, cheerful tone sounded strained, but Alcor didn't seem to notice, watching Ian carefully instead.

"Look, it's not that I don't trust you, but even the big cat enclosure at the zoo is relatively safe unless you walk into it wearing a dress made out of raw meat," Alcor said. "I'll help you guys sort out this wedding stuff, but why don't you postpone the Gravity Falls trip until this thing is safely buried under a couple thousand tons of concrete and steel?"

"No," Ian said, pushing himself up off the couch despite the fact that he couldn't properly feel his legs. "I'm sick and tired of letting a dead guy run my life. I'm done being scared of Bill Cipher." He folded his arms over his chest, staring Alcor down.

"And I'm sick and tired of whatever's been sabotaging this wedding," Mira agreed, with a pointed glance in Alcor's direction, which the demon didn't even seem to notice. "This day's going to be special, and we're going to have it right away before anything else can go wrong and get in our way!"

A whole variety of expressions flashed across Alcor's face, so fast that Ian would've given each of them their own frame if he'd been animating the scene.

"Fine," Alcor said. "It's up to you guys. But don't say I didn't warn you."

"Never do," Mira said flippantly, flouncing away down the hall. "Ian, come help me pick out something to wear. We're getting married!"

...

The forest has no sense of time. Trees sprout, grow, die. New trees take their place. Fire kills and cleanses. Animals come and go. The forest goes on.

And the forest remembers.

Deep within the woods of Gravity Falls, something that had slumbered for centuries stirred. It did not have a name. Something had given it one, once, but that was a very long time ago and it was forgotten now. It did not matter. The forest went on. 

And the forest remembered.

It remembered fire, not cleansing but destroying, decimating. It remembered change, transformation, terror, agony.

It remembered the one who tried to bring the end of the forest.

Deep within the woods of Gravity Falls, something that had slumbered for centuries raised its antlered head, and sniffed the air. Caught the scent of destruction on the wind.


	4. Chapter 4

"This is gonna cost you more than just one bag of candy-coated chocolate-covered peanuts, you know."

"Mmhm," Mira agreed, barely listening. She’d lived in the Pacific Northwest her whole life, only a few hundred miles from the place where she was standing. Heck, she remembered family vacations in the Redwood National Forest, in the eerie underwater hush of a forest as old as the world. But somehow, nothing had prepared her for Gravity Falls.

It wasn’t anything obvious, that she could easily put her finger on. The trees weren’t anything special, compared to redwoods. The huge cliffs, she knew, had once both had those curious cantilevered tops, but one had sheared off and crashed down into the valley over a century ago, taking out a chunk of the sprawl around the historic town and leaving the cliffs relatively ordinary. (If she was remembering her history right, that was also when Gravity Falls and its woods had been declared a national park and construction had been restricted - unless that had been after the Shedu rampage of 2283?) The sun shone, the wind ruffled the treetops and blew the occasional chill and waft of spruce in her direction, somewhere off in the woods a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat echoed. A squirrel darted quickly out along a branch of a pine tree just in front of her, and was just as quickly snatched off the branch by a lurking gnome.

It seemed...peaceful. Pretty. Idyllic. Just another small town nestled in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

But...

Mira had felt it the moment they’d arrived. It wasn’t something she could easily describe, but her writer’s brain struggled to wrap words around it anyway. It was a sense of...not danger, exactly, but there was danger in it. Not excitement either, though that was part of it, too. No, what struck her was more the sense of vast and incredible... _potential_. Like something huge and important and earth-shaking was waiting, just around the corner, for her to stumble across it. Like the whole world was holding its breath.

Above everything, though, it felt familiar.

Alcor glanced over in her direction, and Mira noticed he had a strange half-smile on his face, a smile she had only seen a handful of times before.

“You feel it, huh?” he asked, and Mira could only nod, slow and awed, as she looked up and around at the woods unfolding around her.

And at Ian, who was making a face. Mira caught his gaze and raised an eyebrow, and he managed a watery smile, though it quickly turned back into a frown as he looked around at the hidden and half-overgrown clearing Alcor had chosen to land them in, far away from curious stares and gossip. His eyes narrowed warily as he surveyed the circle of birch and pine trees surrounding them.

“Sorry,” he said. “Something about this place is just giving me the heebie-jeebies. I’m pretty sure it’s these trees. Nothing needs that many eyes.”

Mira sucked in her lips, trying not to smile. “Oh no, not the heebie-jeebies,” she managed, before the smile grew too much to hold in.

Ian watched her for a moment with an expression like a Buckingham Palace guard being shown the funniest video of all time, before sighing and rolling his eyes. Mira didn’t miss the little smile he shot in her direction, but chose not to mention it.

“Seriously though, can we get out of these trees? I think there’s supposed to be a town around here somewhere,” Ian said, starting towards the opposite edge of the clearing.

Mira exchanged a look with Alcor, who shrugged, and then turned to follow her boyfriend into the trees.

In the woods behind them, something watched them go.

...

In sixth grade, Ian and everyone else he knew had been forced to take a History unit on the Transcendence.

Not that it had been bad, or anything, they'd just all been hitting the age where learning about stuff that happened a thousand years ago was starting to take a backseat to learning about the mysteries of what went on in the other locker room. But Ian's teacher had really tried to make the lessons fun and interactive, even going so far as to host a '2000s Day' where everyone got to dress up in old-fashioned, neon clothes and eat all kinds of deep-fried foods that never should have been deep-fried and talk like they were totally tubular, man. 

It had been fun, and Ian had even caught a little of Ms. Polinsky's enthusiasm. There really was something arresting about the story of a sleepy little town, hidden in the mountains, where the end of the world was stopped in its tracks and magic itself was born. Ian had imagined what it must be like to actually be there, even so many centuries later, had daydreamed about walking over the place where a demon had died and the weird had spilled out into the world. He'd imagined that it might feel solemn. Grand. Maybe even a little tingly. Above everything else, though, there'd have to be a sense of awe, of immense time and power and meaning. It'd be hushed, of course. He'd stand there, and feel the world settling down around him, feel simultaneously dwarfed and exalted by the sheer importance of where he stood.

A bicycle sped past, nearly knocking him over, and the cat in its basket yowled at him as it flashed by. The bike kicked up a spray of mud, spattering Ian's face. He brushed it away with one flannel sleeve, spitting onto the sidewalk to get the taste of mud out of his mouth.

"Hey!" a voice squeaked from the other side of the street, and Ian looked around to see the smallest, oldest person he'd ever seen in a police uniform shakily waving a nightstick in his direction. "Hey, you, that's vandalism, you know! I could give you a citation!"

Ian pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. There was something about the deadly solemnity with which the little old officer threatened a citation that was nothing short of hilarious, but he had a feeling it would be a bad idea to laugh where the officer could see it.

"Thanks for the warning!" he called instead, waving a hand in the officer's direction. The officer eyed him suspiciously, before turning their motorised scooter away down the street and starting to putter off. Ian was sure he caught them muttering something about 'hooligans' as they went.

"Welcome to Gravity Falls, huh?" Ian asked nobody in particular, looking up and down the street he'd found himself on. At one end, an enormous bronze statue of a buffalo dominated a small square. At the other end, the backside of a big concrete sign thanked him for visiting and asked him to please come again soon. In between...wasn't much. A few bakeries, several competing souvenir shops with pathetically half-hearted almost-pun names and stock that they'd probably bought from the same Bangladeshi wholesaler in the windows, a coffee shop, a chain restaurant masquerading as an independent local restaurant, an actual independent local restaurant with an aura of insufferable smugness that radiated a full five feet from its perimeter. Standard issue for any tourist town.

The sound of footsteps behind him told him that Mira had followed him. Ian turned to shoot her a smile. “Hey, great news, stardust! I didn’t get arrested!”

Mira opened her mouth, and then stopped and blinked like she had to recalculate the response she’d been about to give. “Was there...a danger of you being arrested?”

“Based on the look that officer gave me? I’d say about a 16% chance.” Ian slung an arm around Mira’s shoulders, and Mira squawked, pushing him off. 

“Ack! You’re all mucky!”

“Yup! Courtesy of a citizen of this fair metropolis!” Ian gave his sleeve another futile wipe with one hand. He’d thought the mud would’ve started to dry by now. “You know, usually I’d chalk this kind of thing up to superstition, but I’m getting the feeling this town really doesn’t want me around.”

Mira gave him a shove in the side that was just slightly too hard to be playful. “Don’t be silly! It’s just a town. Small city? It’s bigger than I expected.”

“It’s definitely grown, but it was pretty big for a town to start with,” Alcor said, from somewhere just behind Ian. Even though he should really have been used to the demon popping up out of thin air by now, Ian still jumped. Right into the puddle in the gutter in front of him. 

“Oh man, you are _so_  gooped,” Mira laughed, as Ian stared down at his jeans in despair. “You look like a Mud-squatch.”

Ian forced an irritated, too-wide smile onto his face before he turned back to face Mira and Alcor. “Hey, here’s an idea! How about we find a honeymoon hotel to check into _before_  we get married, so I can wash my stupid clothes? And body. I should probably get the mud off my face.”

“Oh, Alcor can -” Mira started, but Alcor shook his head. 

“Not until you pay up for popping you out here. You still owe me, remember? I can’t just keep giving you freebies all the time, it's bad for my mental health.”

“I mean, you own my literal soul, so in a sense I’ve already paid you more than any of the deals we’ve ever made are worth,” Mira started, and Alcor’s wings twitched. “Joking! I was joking!”

"All right, new plan," Ian said, firmly. "Before we do anything else, we're going into that café over there and I'm getting a coffee."

Mira and Alcor both looked at him expectantly. Ian shrugged. "I would’ve included you, but I don't know what you two want to order. I'm not omniscient here!"

Mira winced. Alcor's face stayed perfectly still, but his wings gave one sharp, violent flutter and his clawed hands clenched and then slowly unclenched.

"Still too soon," Ian sighed, half to himself, shaking his head as he turned and started towards the café. "Coffee."

The car that screeched out of nowhere only missed hitting him because Mira grabbed him and pulled him back onto the sidewalk.

...

“Okay. So we’re going to need a place for Ian to clean up, an officiant, and some witnesses,” Mira said, before taking a sip of her toasted marshmallow steamer. She licked sweet foam from her top lip, smiling a little despite herself as the warmth from the drink seeped into her hands where they were wrapped around the cup. “I think the witnesses are gonna be the hard part, unless we’re doing a standard courthouse service.”

“No way,” Ian says, reaching across the table and putting his hand on Mira’s wrist, giving a little squeeze. “We’re gonna make this special. Which reminds me, we should walk around town a bit, find a nice place to do the ceremony -”

“I liked that clearing we landed in,” Mira said. “It was...nice. Peaceful. _So_  pretty. And, I don’t know, there was just something about it. It felt...welcoming.”

Ian stared at her blankly.

“Welcoming,” he repeated, flat and disbelieving. Mira raised an eyebrow at him, taking another sip of her steamer. “I mean, I guess the feeling of being watched could be...welcoming.”

“Being _watched_?” Mira asked, blinking. Ian stared at her, looking almost as confused as she felt.

“Interesting,” Alcor said, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms over his chest. He looked profoundly uncomfortable in the plain black tuxedo-printed t-shirt and black jeans he’d picked out for his human disguise to wear, shifting around in his seat and constantly reaching up reflexively to adjust a bow tie he wasn’t wearing. Mira recognised the motion. Ian did it every time he was in the same room as her parents. 

Ian’s left eye twitched, and he just barely covered it by taking a sip of his coffee.

Alcor took a long slurp of the excessively sweet frozen coffee drink Mira had bought him as a sacrifice, raising his eyebrows over the glass at Mira like he’d made some kind of joke.

Mira ignored both of them, staring into the pile of foam slowly dissolving from on top of her drink. 

“Can - Tyrone - be one of our witnesses?” Ian asked, a little too loud, and Alcor shook his head.

“I mean, I’m not legally a real person.” He started, his head snapping up as he stared at the door. “But they are. At least, I think they are. What are they doing here?”

Mira looked up, turning to glance over her shoulder. She caught sight of the people Alcor had noticed at the same time as they noticed her. 

Rosa’s face lit up, and she hurried over to Ian and Mira’s table. Sun-mi hung back just a little, looking from Mira to Ian to Alcor like she was trying to work out the answer to a riddle, but when Rosa flung her arms around Ian’s neck and he hugged her back, she broke into a big smile and walked over.

“I wasn’t sure if it was really you for a second,” she said, leaning against the table beside Mira. “Why are you here? And who’s your friend?”

“Well, if this ain’t one hell of a coincidence!” Rosa boomed, giving Ian a ferocious noogie. “What’re the chances?”

“Slim to none,” Alcor muttered, eyeing her suspiciously. Sun-mi glanced in his direction, then turned back to Mira, raising one eyebrow.

“Tyrone,” Mira sighed. “This is Sun-mi, my friend the journalist, and Rosa Darling, Ian’s best friend from way back and international popstar -”

“Excuse you, I never renounced my title of punk princess,” Rosa laughed, as Ian tried unsuccessfully to slip out from under the arm she’d wrapped around his neck. 

“- and Sun-mi, Rosa, this is Tyrone.” Mira shot a pointed glance in Alcor’s direction, and Alcor took another petulant slurp of his iced coffee slush. “We go way back.”

Sun-mi’s raised eyebrow climbed higher. “I thought you didn’t have friends growing up.”

“Very tactful, thanks,” Mira said, raising her mug to Sun-mi. “What brings you back here? I thought you were in Iceland.”

“I asked you first,” Sun-mi said, a half-smile blooming on her face. She turned and grabbed a chair from the empty table beside Mira, pulling it up to Mira’s table. “I actually received a call from the university, they wanted someone to investigate an ancient cave they got a call about and for some reason they thought I was still in the country. I dropped everything and came as soon as I heard about it, though. They’re thinking it dates back to well before the Transcendence and might be one of the missing pieces in the puzzle of how we came to have magic.” She stopped, sounding a little breathless, her eyes bright, and cleared her throat, gathering her composure. “Of course, elves have a long and storied tradition dating back well before the Transcendence -”

“But they’re not nearly so sexy to a grant committee as a brand-new archaeological find?” Mira said, smiling. Sun-mi smiled ruefully, and Mira grimaced in sympathy.

"An' I'm booked ta play this place's music festival next week," Rosa interjected, ignoring Ian's muffled protests. "It's got - some silly name, Treebark or something -"

"Woodstick," Alcor said, into his iced coffee. Rosa ignored him too.

"Figured I might as well turn up early, do the touristy thing. Y'know, I've never been here before? And we just live down the coast!"

"That's what Ian and I thought too," Mira said, and Sun-mi folded her arms on the table, leaning forward to get a look at Mira's face.

"Speaking of which, it was a strange enough coincidence running into Rosa here." Her stare was pointed. Mira tried not to shift uncomfortably under it.

"Ian and I..." She glanced over at Ian, who stared helplessly back from Rosa's chokehold. "Are...eloping?"

Rosa gave an exaggerated gasp. Sun-mi blinked.

"Surprise?" Mira said, weakly, shrugging.

"Beale!" Rosa exploded, noogie-ing Ian harder than before. His yelp was quickly muffled by her solid arm. "You were gettin' married and ya weren't gonna tell me?"

"Honestly, it was a very wise idea," Sun-mi said, but she sounded disappointed. "Wedding planning is an unnecessary hassle."

“You said it, not me,” Mira said, with a smile. “Hey, would you guys like something to drink?”

“London fog, please,” Sun-mi said, at the same time as Rosa finally released Ian to point at Alcor’s coffee slush and say, “Whatever that is, I’ll take one with chocolate shavings on top.”

“Great. I need a refill too. A- _Tyrone_ , would you come help me carry drinks?”

They’d placed their order and were waiting for the barista when Mira said, in an undertone she hoped couldn’t be heard back at the table, “This was a wonderful surprise. It really means a lot to have our friends here for the wedding. Thank you so much. ”

“I - uh.” Alcor reached up to rub awkwardly at the back of his neck. “Would this be a bad time to tell you that that wasn’t me?”

Mira stared at him for so long that his nose started to twitch. 

“You don’t look like you’re lying,” she said.

“I’m not!”

“But it’s too weird of a coincidence for both of them to be here, today, in this exact coffeeshop, when one of them wasn’t supposed to be here for another week and one of them was supposed to be in _Iceland -”_

“I don’t know!” Alcor said, sounding miserable. Mira watched his face for another long moment, before huffing out a sigh.

“Yes, you do. You’re pretty sure it’s something to do with this secret ancient Bill Cipher cave, but you don’t want to tell me because you think I’ll be mad.” She reached over the counter to take Sun-mi’s drink from the barista, quietly thanking him as she did. 

“You’ve known me for _too_  long,” Alcor grumbled. “Okay. So I have a theory. The first two times Bill rose to power in Gravity Falls, there were ten souls who appeared in this area along with him. And there’s a prophecy in that cave that says those ten souls can seal him away in his Nightmare Realm forever.”

“So you’re thinking...what, because that leftover Bill-stink got let out of its secret hidey-hole, it’s drawing those ten people back to Gravity Falls?” Mira asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t put it in exactly those words, but yeah, pretty much,” Alcor said, taking Rosa’s drink from the barista. Mira eyed him as he raised the straw, unthinkingly, to his mouth, and he slowly lowered it again. 

“So this isn’t a _bad_  weird magical coincidence,” Mira said, thoughtfully, watching the barista foaming the milk for her steamer. “Actually, it’s kind of the opposite. If any weird Bill-stuff happens while we’re here, then there’s already a backup plan in place to take care of him!” She smiled, wondering if she smiled big enough if it’d make its way into Alcor’s eyes. 

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Alcor said, thoughtfully. Mira had to glower at him again to keep him from taking a sip of Rosa’s coffee slush.

“Do you need another one of those?”

Alcor looked down at the chocolate shavings sprinkled on top of the whipped cream. A too-long, too-prehensile pointed tongue slipped out of his mouth and licked his lips just as the barista turned around to hand Mira her steamer. The cup slipped out of the barista’s hand, as he froze in apparent terror, and Mira shrieked as hot steamed milk sloshed all over her front. 

“...Ian’s right,” she said, setting Sun-mi’s London fog down on the counter and carefully peeling her sodden t-shirt away from her front. “I think we might need to find a hotel.”

...

The hotel, when they finally found one with a vacancy, was close to the centre of town and so heavily decorated with beady-eyed taxidermy that it made even Ian a little nervous. 

“Oh man, we stayed in this place when my sister Belle and I came here!” Alcor exclaimed, loudly, as they walked into the lobby. “I can’t believe it’s still here! And that they haven’t got rid of that beaver!”

“Did you actually ever have a sister Belle, or is this ‘Tyrone’ speaking?” Ian asked, under his breath, and Alcor shot him an enigmatic smile. “You know what, forget I asked. Hi! We’d like a room for two, please.”

The teenager behind the desk looked from Ian, to Mira, to Alcor, and back to Ian.

“Oh, he’s from around here,” Ian said, with a glance in Alcor’s direction. “Doesn’t need a hotel room.”

“Okay,” the teenager said, clearly already bored. “Can I get an account code and a retinal print?”

The hotel room, once they got there, was smaller than the living room in their apartment and smelled faintly of something that might have been left over from the taxidermy process. Mira instantly pronounced it ‘charming’. Privately, Ian thought that it needed some sprucing up - some wallpaper, curtains, maybe a blowtorch. 

“You know what,” Mira said, drawing the drapes before she stripped off her shirt, “I honestly kind of want to just sleep on everything that’s happened today and pick up again where we left off tomorrow. I mean, we have a hotel room now, we have witnesses. I think we’ll have better luck finding an officiant and having the ceremony tomorrow if we’re all fresh and clean and not worrying about things.”

Ian tried not to let her see his breath of relief. “I think that’s a fantastic idea, stardust. The light’s too low for pictures now anyway.” And it’d give him time to try to come up with some vows. Mira had forgotten about them for the moment, it seemed, but there was no way she was going to forget when it came to the actual ceremony. And they’d cut so much out of their plans, it was really the least Ian could do. He just...had to... _write_  them.

Mira beamed. “Great! So...where d’you want to go for dinner?”

For their last dinner as an unmarried couple, they ended up at a greasy spoon diner in a beat-up trailer stuck onto a Quonset hut halfway into the middle of the woods. Alcor wouldn’t shut up about the pancakes and the abandoned rail car slash redwood log that used to serve as a diner and Ian picked at his hash until it got cold. There was a knot of something heavy and greasy and cold in the pit of his stomach, and when he looked up, he thought he saw a trace of desperation in Mira’s manic smile as she nodded along to all of Alcor’s stories about Gravity Falls Back In The Day. 

They were going to be married. _He_  was going to be married. To an actual, whole entire other person. Forever. Until they were both dead. 

Starting...tomorrow. 

At least Mira seemed almost as nervous as he was.

...

At least Ian seemed almost as nervous as she was.

Mira tossed the covers off, then rolled back over and snuggled down under them. Ian had gone to sleep what felt like hours ago, but she just couldn’t seem to get there. The ancient hot-water heater in the hotel room kept clunking and thunking and spewing wave after wave of suffocating heat. Mira could swear that, once, it had gone silent for ten solid minutes, only to burst out with a perfect ‘C’ chord at the top of its pipes. Ian was a warm weight in the bed beside her, dead to the world and oblivious to the streak of blindingly silver-white moonlight that fell through the crack in the curtains and right across Mira’s face. 

She had to sleep. She had to _sleep_. She _had_  to _sleep_.

Somewhere in the hotel room, a clock ticked off quiet seconds with a steady beat. Mira’s body felt heavy, so heavy, but her eyes refused to drift closed. She lay still, feeling like she was sinking slowly into the bed like a cartoon character into a cloud, watching the moon through the crack in the curtains. There was a gentle night breeze wafting in from the window they’d cracked open when they’d finally admitted defeat against the heater, and it ruffled the curtains just enough that the shaft of moonlight that lay across Mira’s face wavered back and forth, just slightly. Combined with the steady tick of the clock, it was almost hypnotic, to watch the shadows of the curtains drift back and forth, back and forth, back and forth...

Mira’s eyes slowly sank closed, her lashes brushing against her cheeks for a moment before they fluttered open again, and then sank closed once more. 

She didn’t see the antlered shadow that fell across the bedspread, blocking out the moonlight.


	5. Chapter 5

When Ian woke up, the other side of the bed was empty.

The covers were all rumpled and pushed down to the foot of the bed, the blue light on the coffeemaker was on, and the window was forced wider than it had been last night, wide enough to blow the curtains out into the room like a couple of very ugly snot-green-damask ghosts. Somehow, it was still unbearably hot in the room.

Ian patted the mattress beside him, but it was only about as warm as the rest of the room. He couldn't tell how long Mira must have been up before he was.

Ian pulled the pillow over his head and pressed his face into the mattress. The radiator's rattle was muffled, but he could still hear it, drumming out a syncopated rhythm. Every so often, a beat would turn into a hiss, and Ian held his breath until the next clunk or pop finally came.

He wasn't getting back to sleep. And he wasn't thinking of anything brilliant and beautiful and meaningful and  _human_  to say to his girlfriend when she became his wife. And it was way too hot under this pillow. 

Finally, Ian shoved the pillow off his head with a sigh, sucking in a long breath of fresh, relatively cool air. He lay still for a moment, bracing himself, before letting his arms, then his legs flop over the side of the bed.

The bathroom door was closed, so Ian started to pull on his clothes, thankfully (and maybe magically) dry after last night's hasty hand-wash in the tub. The coffeemaker turned out to be covered in buttons, all of which had little iconographic symbols on them, none of which seemed to correspond to the prompts on the device's tiny LCD screen. Ian jabbed at buttons at random until the screen froze, and then gave up.

"I'm gonna run down to the lobby and see if they have coffee," Ian said, rapping on the bathroom door. "You want any?"

There was no answer.

Ian gave the door another, harder knock. "Mira? You all right in -"

The bathroom door swung open under Ian's hand. The lights were off, and the room beyond was empty.

"Seriously?" Ian asked the empty hotel room. He cast around for a minute, before finding his phone in his back pocket, and fired off a text to Mira.

_hey early bird, where r u?_

He waited a few minutes, leaning against the doorframe, but didn't get a reply. Ian sighed, stuffing his phone back into his pocket.

"Coffee first," he said, out loud, for no real reason than to hear a human voice in the hotel room, which, even with the clunks and rattles of the radiator, suddenly seemed unusually quiet. "Then whatever this is. But coffee first."

...

There wasn't, as it turned out, coffee in the lobby. Ian had to go into the restaurant attached to the hotel and actually order one. And at that point, he might as well just order breakfast too. Ian texted Mira to meet him at the restaurant or miss out on waffles, and then turned all his attention to his breakfast, resolutely ignoring the little sliver of worry building in the back of his mind. Alcor hadn't been hanging around annoying Ian, either. This wasn't the first time they'd disappeared on a cult bash or something without leaving so much as a note. Ian briefly entertained a thought of Mira showing up at the front desk of their hotel covered head to toe in blood. He wondered if that would get a reaction out of the front desk clerk.

Besides, there were all kinds of mundane reasons she might be gone. Maybe she was scouting out an officiant or a location for their hasty nuptials. Maybe Alcor had popped her over to Japan to pick up her wedding dress. Maybe she'd just gone out for breakfast with Rosa or Sun-mi. It wasn't usual for her not to text him back, but maybe she was just having such a good time that she'd forgotten to check her phone.

Mira hadn't decided that the whole idea of marrying him was cursed and backed out at the last minute. She wouldn't. At least, she wouldn't without telling him.

The waffles were delicious. Mira didn't show up.

...

The construction site was in an uproar when Sun-mi arrived. Apparently, a wizard had been in the day before to inspect the cave, but hadn't left any official record of the investigation and nobody could figure out who he worked for. To make matters worse, the wizard who  _had_  been called in had arrived to do the inspection, been told his services wouldn't be necessary because one of his colleagues had already been there, and had left annoyed. The upshot of all this, Sun-mi gathered from the information the site overseer spewed at her at top speed, was that it would be another few days or even a week before they'd have a solid assessment of whether and how they could start work again.

"Fucking ridiculous," the overseer complained, as she lifted the orange tape cordoning off the cave for Sun-mi to step under. "And now we've got press. Wonder what else can go wrong here. Maybe we'll have a surprise inspection, who knows."

Sun-mi offered an apologetic smile, but she couldn’t bring herself to focus much on the overseer’s litany of complaints. The hole in the side of the cliff consumed all her attention, drawing her eye like a black hole drawing light. There was something about the sight of it that unsettled her, a strange feeling she couldn’t quite put a name to, somewhere between enchantment and dread.

The overseer must have noticed where Sun-mi’s eyes went, because she cleared her throat, and Sun-mi realised she’d been quiet for a while. “Well, there it is. Never knew a hole in the ground could be such an almighty pain in the ass.”

Sun-mi had just enough presence of mind to pull out her phone and snap a few pictures of the construction site, the hole stark black and unnervingly out of place in its aggressively mundane setting.

“Guess you’ll be wanting a tour next,” the overseer said, a note of frustration in her voice.

“If at all possible,” Sun-mi agreed.

“It isn’t. Our wizard inspector was a fraud, we got no guarantee it won’t all collapse on top of you. Or turn you into a newt.” There was a relish in the overseer’s voice that made Sun-mi sure she was finally seeing a silver lining in her wizard problem. “You could try coming back later, but like I said, it could be a week before we can get somebody in here to look at it.”

“Oh,” Sun-mi said. She glanced over at the hole again, and tried to convince herself she was more disappointed than relieved. “That’s too bad.”

“Not that I care if you get turned into a newt,” the overseer said, without malice. “Damn reporters. Just one more thing I don’t need right now.”

“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” Sun-mi promised. “So how was this discovery made?”

“Marybeth!”

The voice made both Sun-mi and the overseer start, the overseer turning to face the approaching newcomers. Sun-mi glanced over her shoulder, but didn’t turn. There was something about the hole leading into the cliff that made her not want to turn her back on it.

The young man who skidded to a halt just outside the barrier of orange tape was breathing hard, but beaming. He waved the person who was following a little ways behind him forwards, but didn’t wait for them to catch up or even check to make sure they were following. “Marybeth! I found the wizard!”

“What?” the overseer - Marybeth - asked, looking over the young man’s shoulder at the person following him, and then let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, no. Rashid, that’s not -”

“No, no, the wizard we sent away yesterday!” Rashid gasped, seemingly starting to recover his breath after his mad dash. “He was still in town, he stayed the night, I caught him at the diner having breakfast and he’ll do the inspection for us now.” He beamed.

The overseer - Marybeth - didn’t look particularly impressed by this, but Sun-mi caught the shadow of a smile crossing her broad features. Sun-mi herself felt a flutter of excited apprehension at the news, and stole another glance at the cave. It hadn’t moved.

“ _For_  a hundred-dollar call-out fee,” the wizard interrupted, ambling up behind Rashid. Sun-mi took a moment to look him over. He didn’t look much older than she was, wiry and insubstantial, but there was a certain cast to his expression, a shadow of disdainful superiority, that she disliked instantly. “ _And_  travel expenses paid. I don’t like getting jerked around like this.”

“None of us do,” the overseer said shortly. “When I catch that so-called wizard...” She cleared her throat into her fist, letting the rest of the sentence dangle like a sword suspended in the air overhead.

“Whatever,” the wizard said, clearly not interested. “Are we doing this thing, or are we standing around here talking all day? My time is valuable.”

The overseer rolled her eyes, but stepped around Sun-mi, lifting the orange tape with a wordlessly-raised eyebrow. The wizard attempted to duck under it with dignified grace, and only half succeeded. He brushed simulcrete dust from his black dress pants, taking the yellow hard hat that Rashid offered and clearing his throat pompously before putting it on. A snap of his fingers, and a ball of bluish light appeared hovering just above his head. Another snap, and a tablet and stylus appeared in his hands with a small thunderclap of displaced air.

“Cool. Let’s get this over with,” he said, affected boredom filling his voice, and turned, walking fast into the black hole sinking into the base of the cliff. His light illuminated the cave around and a little ahead of him, rough rock and dangling stalactites gleaming wet in the dimness. After he’d taken a few steps and nothing had fallen on him or turned him into a newt, the overseer and Rashid followed him.

After a moment’s hesitation, fighting off a sudden and inexplicable reluctance, Sun-mi hurried after them.

...

Finally, finally, after what felt like hours and might actually have been, Ian's phone dinged. He nearly dropped it, fumbling to get it out of his pocket, but the message wasn't from Mira.

Ian let out a sigh as he tapped out a response to Rosa's complaint. If she was already so bored, then why had she bothered coming to town so early in the first place? He knew, of course, it was probably because of ancient demon magic, but still.

Stars, was there even anything left in his life anymore that wasn't because of ancient demon magic? Had there ever been? Even trying to get away from it had just brought him straight into the middle of another mess that had probably been set in motion centuries before he was even born, and Ian was sick and tired of it. Just once, he wanted to make a decision and be sure it was his idea, and only his idea. And that it wasn't going to bring about the end of the world.

His phone dinged again, and Ian sighed. He also wished Mira would start leaving a note or something when she had to go out on cult-bashes and other dark and terrible Mizar errands, like getting milk. He couldn't even lay the blame for this one on Alcor being petty, Mira just had her mind elsewhere half the time. She'd come back bursting with stories and he'd ask her, again, to let him know when she was going to need to disappear with no warning for several hours, and she'd very solemnly promise never the let it happen again. The very next time she had to go out, she'd leave a note, or text him. Then she'd forget all over again and they'd have to start over from the beginning.

Ian opened his new message. Rosa wanted to know if he could meet up to do something entertaining. Ian huffed out a sigh, and sent back a text telling her to meet him at the hotel in ten minutes.

Rosa was there in fifteen, with a holographic lipstick and a very pissed-off expression on her face. She stomped up to the door of the restaurant, slamming it open and throwing herself into the seat across from Ian.

"Transportation in this place!" she huffed, bringing up the menu on the tablet surface under the table glass. "You know I had to walk here?"

"The hardship," Ian said, and Rosa's eyes flicked up to shoot him a glare under her brows.

"I'm a celebrity, B- Ian. I don't  _walk_  places." She didn't seem to be able to completely wrestle down the smile, and quickly turned back to the tablet. "Tell me this place does a decent caramel macchiato."

"Don't know, haven't tried it," Ian said, and Rosa looked up, frowning.

"Where's Mira? What're you doin' eating breakfast so late, anyway? Aren't you two gettin' married today?"

Ian leaned his chin in one hand. "I'm actually not sure."

Rosa's eyes went wide and almost perfectly round, and she clapped a hand to her rosebud mouth. Ian groaned and buried his face in his hands.

" _Beale_ ," Rosa hissed. 

"Look, just don't ask, okay? I don't know, and I'm trying not to worry about it."

"Do you even know where she is?" Rosa demanded, poking Ian in the shoulder, hard. Ian shook his head, without removing his face from his hands. Rosa's gasp was audible. "Ian Thomas Beale! Why didn't ya call me right away? What the hell happened? Did y'all have a fight?"

"This is why I didn't call you," Ian groaned, finally lifting his head from his hands. Rosa paused mid-poke, but the look on her face said clearly that she'd gladly complete it if Ian said anything stupid. "Because I knew you'd worry, and make a big deal out of it, when I don't even know for sure that anything's wrong. It's probably just -" He paused, significantly, meeting Rosa's eyes like that might help her pick up on his meaning. " 'Tyrone' business."

A frown creased Rosa's forehead. "What, that skinny nerd y'all had with ya at the coffeeshop yesterday? Who is he, anyway? Mira ain't never mentioned anybody named Tyrone before, but she said she'd known him since - oh." Her eyes went wide all over again, though thankfully not in worry and outrage this time. " _Ohhhh_. Y'mean that was -"

"Shhhhhh," Ian said, leaning across the table to press a hand over Rosa's mouth before she could finish the sentence. Rosa's eyes narrowed, and something slimy and warm that could only be her tongue swept over Ian's palm. He yanked his hand back, wiping it hastily on his pants. "Okay, you're disgusting, but yeah. That's him, and I haven't seen him all morning either. They're probably just off together, doing - that thing they do."

Rosa batted her eyes innocently. "Disgustin'? That there's a perfectly natural bodily function."

"Just what I said. Disgusting." Ian gave up wiping his hand on his pants. "You know what, I'm going to the bathroom. Gotta wash the digestive enzymes off my hands."

"There aren't digestive enzymes in spit," Rosa scoffed, but she looked perturbed. Ian gave her his best, most perturbing grin.

"Wanna bet?" He pushed himself up from his chair, leaning across the table to rub the palm she'd licked on Rosa's rosy cheek before walking away from the table towards the bathroom.

Behind him, he heard Rosa make a little strangled noise, and then scrabble for the napkins.

...

The sunlight at the end of the tunnel was the most beautiful thing Sun-mi had ever seen. She stumbled towards it, bashing her knee against a stalagmite as she went. She barely noticed.

The air outside was fresh and warm and faintly pine-scented, a welcome relief from the stifling air in the cave. It had started out cold, like a mausoleum, in the tunnel leading through the rock, but the cavern at the end -

Sun-mi sucked in a long, deep breath of fresh air, leaning heavily against one of the stakes holding the orange tape in place around the cave.

"Hey, are you all right?" Rashid's voice called from behind her, and Sun-mi half-turned. Just the sight of the cave mouth, black and hungry, sent a fresh wave of sick terror through her. Out here in the sunlight, with the normal sounds of life all around her, it wasn't quite the all-consuming, driving force that it had been underground, but a shiver still ran through her at the sight of it.

"Seal it back up," Sun-mi rasped, a little astonished by the sound of her own voice and by the words coming out of her mouth. She deliberately shut her mouth and swallowed, trying to get the feeling of sandpaper out of her throat. "Nobody should be in there. Nobody should see that. It should be lost and forgotten forever. Seal it back up."

"That's what we want to do," the overseer said, emerging from that black hole in the side of the cliff. Her voice was as gruff and as unbothered as ever, but she crouched down next to Sun-mi (when had Sun-mi sat down? She wasn't sure) and put a broad hand on her shoulder. "You aren't some kinda psychic sensitive or something, are you?"

Sun-mi shook her head no. The strange terror that had seized her when she'd laid eyes on that cave painting of the wheel was starting, slowly, to fade, and she felt more and more embarrassed of her reaction with every passing second. When she tried to stand up, though, her knees still felt like they were made of very weak springs, wobbling in unpredictable directions and threatening to collapse at any moment. She sat back down on the dirt pile, silently mourning her pencil skirt.

"You have any idea what happened down there?" the overseer asked, almost kindly, and Sun-mi shook her head again. She should have brushed the woman's hand aside, should have composed herself and regained control of the situation, but - there was something very comforting about the hand on her shoulder.

The overseer and Rashid shared a look.

"Rashid, get back down there and make sure the wizard doesn't disappear," the overseer said, finally, before turning back to Sun-mi. "You got a friend or somebody I can call to come pick you up?" she asked. "I don't think you should go down there again."

Sun-mi started to shake her head no, again, but then remembered.

"I - I can call my friend Mira," she said. "I'm sorry about what I said, I don't know what came over me. Obviously that cave is a vitally important archaeological find, it would make no sense to seal it up again now that it's been found."

The overseer shrugged one shoulder. "It does if you're planning to build a tourist trap on top of it. Give your friend a call. I'll sit with you until she gets here."

"Thank you," Sun-mi said, and the overseer nodded.

"But we're not sitting on this dirt. Think you can make it over to the site office?"

...

Ian looked at his face in the mirror, and sighed.

The cold water tap took a couple of solid yanks, but finally it turned in his hand. The faucet shuddered, and then belched up a flood of icy water. Ian stared at it. It was brown.

"Hotel that's hundreds of years old, in the middle of a national park," Ian reminded himself, before leaning over to splash cold water over his face. It didn't exactly help, but it did make the buzzing restlessness of anxiety a little easier to ignore. It was fine. It was fine. The hotel probably drew its water from a well, and Mira was fine, she was with Alcor -

Ian straightened up, groping for a towel to dry his face, and saw Alcor's face reflected in the mirror just behind his right shoulder.

Ian swore, spinning around with his arm raised to hit the demon before he even really knew what was happening. Alcor yelled too, flailing backwards, and there was a confused moment before Alcor slipped on the tile floor and went flying into one of the stalls headfirst. There was a splash, and a gurgle, and Alcor emerged a second later, glowering up at his dripping hair until it dried, seemingly from the heat of sheer embarrassment. 

"Not one word," he grumbled to Ian, who had pressed a hand over his mouth to hold back the snicker.

"You have got to stop popping up behind me in mirrors like that," Ian said, in return.

“Maybe when your reactions stop being hilarious,” Alcor said, putting his pinkie into one ear and wiggling it around. When he pulled it out, a small waterspout shot out of his ear and splashed onto the tiles. Ian noticed that he hadn’t bothered to put on his ‘Tyrone’ body again. “How’s Mira doing? Did you guys finally settle on a venue?”

Alcor suddenly seemed very far away, down the end of a long tunnel. “I don’t know,” Ian said, but he could barely hear his own words over the hollow ringing that grew in his ears. “I haven’t seen her this morning. I thought she was with you.”

Alcor stared. “I thought she was with  _you_.”

Ian’s limbs suddenly felt as though they were both leaden and light enough to drift off and float away. “It’s okay,” he heard himself saying, as if from behind a thick glass wall. “Maybe Rosa’s seen her. Or - maybe she’s with her other friend, Sun-mi -”

As if on cue, Ian’s phone started to ring. Ian and Alcor both stared at it, blank, for a long moment, before Ian finally picked the call up. “Hello?”

“Ian?” Sun-mi’s voice blasted out of the speaker. Ian winced. He’d forgotten he’d had the sound all the way up to play jazz in the kitchen two nights ago. “I’ve been calling Mira and she isn’t picking up - is she with you? Would you two come and pick me up?”

Ian and Alcor locked eyes over the phone’s glowing screen.

“You go get her,” Alcor said, finally. “I should be able to find Mira, wherever she is.”

“Hello?” Sun-mi’s voice echoed out of the phone speaker. “Who is that?”

“Mira’s friend Tyrone,” Ian said, hurriedly. “Look, I’ll pick you up. Where are you?”

“Do you not know where Mira is?” Sun-mi asked, and now she sounded anxious. Ian wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard her sound anxious before. As far as he knew, she had two modes: suspicious and sarcastic. “Please tell me you know where Mira is. I have -” She stopped, cleared her throat, and continued, sounding sheepish, almost like she was embarrassed of the words coming out of her own mouth. “A really bad feeling.”

“Me too,” Ian answered, honestly. “We’ll figure it out. Where do you want me to pick you up?”


	6. Chapter 6

There was something that Mira was supposed to be remembering.

Whatever it was, it was on the tip of her mind, but she couldn’t seem to quite get it out. It was starting to annoy her, almost enough to disturb the sense of peace that had settled over the woods.

But only almost. There was something about the quiet, the absolute stillness of the trees around her, thrown into stark black and white by the moonlight and the shadows it cast. The sounds of traffic, the people bustling through the streets, the quickfire rapping of woodpecker bills against trees and signposts, the chatter of squirrels, even the late-evening noise of crickets had all vanished. The night air was chilly, but not cold, and Mira found herself drifting as if in a dream through a black-and-white movie set.

Was that what she was supposed to be remembering? The reason she’d come out here in the middle of the night? 

Ahead of her, the street came to an end, trailing out into a river of gravel and disappearing into a black hole between the trees. The gravel crunched under her feet as she followed the road, out of town, past the first arch of trees, into the dark embrace of the forest.

The darkness swallowed her without a trace.

...

“Okay, you just have to not panic,” Ian said, hardly believing the words even as they spilled out of his own mouth. Not panic? That was the exact opposite of what he was doing. “She’s Mizar, right? So her soul is inextricably tethered to Alcor and he should be able to find her. Even if he wasn’t basically omniscient. Which he is. There is  _nothing_  to worry about.”

He nodded, taking a sharp breath in and holding it as he ran a hand through his hair. Nothing to worry about. He’d get back to the hotel and Alcor would probably already be back with Mira in tow. Nothing  _at all_  to worry about.

Except for the little fact that his fiancé had somehow managed to slip away right out from under her demon guardian’s nose, and nobody had noticed anything was wrong. Except for the fact that they were in the most magical place in the world, where the metaphysical equivalent of the used tea leaves of the worst demon to exist in human history had just been unleashed from a long captivity. And that demon had already almost taken her away from him once, even though he was supposed to be dead - 

“Nothing to worry about,” Ian muttered to himself, again, curling the hand in his hair into a fist and giving a little tug, just enough for a prickle of pain to cut through the fog of worry. He squeezed his eyes shut, then blew out a breath and stepped out from behind the front-end loader where Alcor had dropped him off.

Sun-mi grabbed him before he’d made it two steps.

“What took you so long?” she demanded, her eyes sweeping over his face like she was looking for something. Ian was pretty sure he didn’t want to know what she thought she was going to find. “Did you figure out where Mira is? I just have -”

“A bad feeling. You said,” Ian said, with a smile that was trying its best to be apologetic. Sun-mi’s fingers were so tightly clenched in the fabric of Ian’s flannel that he was a little worried it might rip, and she kept looking back over her shoulder at - 

At the hole in the base of the cliff.

“Oh, crap,” Ian muttered, pulling back. Sun-mi took a step after him, before apparently realising what she was doing and self-consciously untangling her fingers from the front of his shirt. She cleared her throat into her hand, deliberately taking a step back from Ian. It was lost on him. Ian couldn’t tear his eyes away from the hole in the cliff. “We, uh. Should get out of here.”

“Absolutely agreed,” Sun-mi said, shortly, and pushed past Ian, hurrying away from the cave open in the middle of the construction site. Ian lingered, for a moment longer, looking. Were his eyes playing tricks on him, or was that a glimmer of gold he saw in the depths of that black pit? Was there a whisper of cruel laughter on the wind that ruffled his hair? Was there a spark of familiarity, an almost-tangible thread of connection, drawing him inexorably forward?

No. There wasn’t. It was sort of anticlimactic. Even, if Ian was being perfectly honest (which he rarely was), a little disappointing.

Ian breathed out, slow.

"Are you coming?" Sun-mi demanded, from somewhere behind him. And then, "Wait, where's your car? How are we getting back?"

...

"So. Mira has cold feet?"

Ian bit his tongue for what felt like the five millionth time since he'd arrived at the construction site. Sun-mi had obviously been badly shaken up by whatever had made her try to call Mira in the first place, and she was Mira's best friend, after all. Ian probably shouldn't be taking the opportunity to play up her worst fears just to see how much he could ruffle her composure.

Besides, it wasn't very funny to see somebody else scared when what they were scared about was Mira being missing.

"I hope not," Ian managed, with a laugh he didn't bother trying to make sound anything but forced. "I'm sure she's fine, though. Al-  _Tyrone's_  got some ideas where she might be, he's looking for her right now." He put on a smile that had really been meant to be reassuring, but which still made Sun-mi alter her course to put another foot of sidewalk between them. "Maybe they'll be back at the hotel by the time we get there."

Sun-mi was silent for a few paces, watching Ian's face and then staring thoughtfully down the street.

"You don't really believe that, though," she said, finally, flatly. "You can feel it too, can't you. Something's not right."

Ian bit down on his tongue again, this time hard enough to sting.

"This is ridiculous," Sun-mi huffed, crossing her arms over her chest and rubbing her upper arms as though trying to work some warmth into them. "Listen to me, I sound like a hedgewitch." She didn't sound all that convinced of her own ridiculousness, though. Ian couldn't say he blamed her.

“Your brain does process information faster than you can consciously pick up on,” Ian said, in what he hoped was a convincing imitation of a reassuring tone of voice. “Of course, it’s working off the usual human cocktail of existing social schemas, cultural biases, and ingrained prejudices, but hey! It’s still processing!”

Sun-mi was looking at him strangely. Ian flashed her his biggest, most cheerful smile.

“I’d understand if Mira got cold feet,” Sun-mi said, at last, as though pronouncing a verdict. “I don’t know  _what_  she thinks she sees in you.”

Ian shrugged one shoulder, the smile starting to feel more like a grimace. “Probably my oodles of natural charisma and rugged good looks. Or maybe it’s my musk!”

Sun-mi’s eyebrows drew together, and she turned to look away from Ian, shaking her head. She didn’t say anything more.

They were about a block away from the hotel when Ian finally worked up the courage to ask, “She didn’t…tell you she didn’t want to marry me, did she?” The words stung his tongue like acid, and he wanted nothing more than to swallow them back down, lock them up somewhere where somebody like Sun-mi would never be able to hear them and turn them against him.

Sun-mi’s steps slowed, and then stopped altogether, so that Ian was a few paces ahead before he realized that she wasn’t walking alongside him anymore. 

“Oh no,” Ian said, trying and failing to laugh through it. “How bad is it, doc?”

Sun-mi glanced up, her dark eyes meeting and holding Ian’s for a moment before they flicked away.

“It hasn’t been easy, you know,” she said, as if that was an answer. “For her. When you’ve had all this success, you’ve got this huge fanbase, and she’s still struggling to get her career off the ground.”

“She told you that?” Ian said, and Sun-mi nodded, once.

“Her family assumes she’s going to give it up to support you. You know that, right?” Sun-mi put her head to one side, crossing her arms over her chest and fixing Ian with a laser stare. “Because she’s going to be your wife. She makes excuses for them, she doesn’t think they’re doing it on purpose. But it doesn’t really matter if they mean to or not, does it? The end result is the same.”

Ian swallowed, hard. “She didn’t tell me about that,” he managed. And if Mira hadn’t told him about something that important, what else hadn’t she told him?

“I’m not surprised. She thought you had ‘enough on your plate’. And obviously you didn’t notice enough to ask,” Sun-mi said, raising both hands to waggle a set of air quotation marks. She must really be pissed, not to bother trying to keep her hands inconspicuous like she usually did. “Look, Mira is my best friend. For some incomprehensible reason, she’s decided she wants you to be a permanent fixture in her life. I care about her and I want her to be happy, so as long as you keep making her happy, I can keep my mouth shut.” Sun-mi jabbed index and middle finger at Ian in an accusing point. “But right now? If she wanted to leave you, I’d help her pack.”

For a moment, Ian couldn’t make the discordant jangle in the back of his brain form into words. When it finally did, what came out wasn’t an apology, or an explanation, or anything else that might actually have been helpful. “So she  _didn’t_  tell you she was leaving me.”

There was a moment of very, very dangerous silence.

“No,” Sun-mi said, softly, at last. “She didn’t say anything to me at all.”

Ian huffed out a breath.

“So if she didn’t say anything to you, and she didn’t say anything to me…” He stopped, the horrible realization curdling his relief almost instantly. “Then she probably didn’t disappear of her own free will.”

Sun-mi’s face didn’t shift much, but Ian could still pinpoint the moment when her expression turned from icy fury into sick realization.

“Oh, shit,” she said, and Ian nodded agreement. “Oh,  _shit_. You’re  _right_. Where was this Tyrone planning to look for her? How long has she been gone? We should call someone, the police, alert the media, get her picture in circulation -”

"Pretty sure they don't do anything about missing persons until they've been missing for more than twenty-four hours," Ian said. The words felt like concrete drying quickly around his tongue, tasted bad and sucked all the moisture out of his mouth.

"Then we post it to the Gravity Falls alerts boards! That's what they're _for_ , isn't it?" Sun-mi's eyes narrowed. "Don't you want to find her?"

"I literally just found out she was missing!" Ian protested. "I thought she was with Tyrone!"

Sun-mi's eyes narrowed further.

"Just who is this 'Tyrone', anyway?" she demanded, taking a step forward into Ian's personal space. "Do you know you can trust him? Do you remember when he showed up and how he entered your life? Because I know Mira says he's an old friend, but I've been her friend for years now and she's literally never mentioned him. She's even told me she didn't have friends growing up, so unless you've got something to prove he isn't some kind of shapeshifting, mind-altering parasite -"

"Some kind of  _what_  now?" Ian asked, holding up both hands with the palms toward Sun-mi. He didn't step back, though. She'd probably see that as admitting defeat. Instead, he made eye contact with her and resolutely held it until she blinked. "Look, we can trust Tyrone. He wants to find Mira just as much as we do."

Sun-mi's eyes flicked to Ian's golden right eye. "I don't know who this 'we' you keep talking about is," she said, shortly, but she took a step backwards. Ian silently counted it as a win. "All I know is that someone took my best friend. And until she's back, safe and sound, then there's no one in Gravity Falls I can trust."

Before Ian could come up with a coherent response to that, Sun-mi pushed past him and stalked towards the hotel. She didn't look back.

"Ian!"

Ian managed not to yell out loud at the sudden whisper less than an inch from his ear, but it was a close thing. Thankfully, the strangled yelp that did escape him wasn't enough to make Sun-mi turn around. " _What_  did I tell you about popping up behind me?"

Alcor didn't look ashamed, or even like he'd heard Ian. He was, thankfully, still wearing his 'Tyrone' disguise, though Ian seriously wondered whether anyone would buy it if he kept popping up out of thin air.

"Did you find Mira? Where is she?" Ian asked, and the frown Alcor's pretend human face was wearing grew deeper.

"No. I didn't find her," he said. "But I know where she went."


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I have to apologise for the unannounced, unexpected month-and-a-half hiatus. I found out by trial and error (mostly error) that I can’t consistently update two longfics while also consistently working on a novel. I’m going to finish this and Imbalance, but after that, I’m planning to take a step back from fic to focus more on my original fiction. I hope you’ll check out my [tumblr](http://marypsue.tumblr.com) or my [novel's blog](http://katesummervsthemultiverse.tumblr.com) if you’re interested in what I’m getting up to!

The first thing that caught the eye, entering Gravity Falls, were the cliffs.

It had been true in 2012 and it was true now, a little over a thousand years later. The valley in which the town nestled sloped gently downwards, only to abruptly terminate in a towering wall of rock. The cliffs loomed over the valley like enormous sentinels, keeping watch over everything that lay before them. One of the huge outcroppings of bare stone that hung over the valley had lost its top, a chunk of rock almost the size of the town itself sliding off and crashing into the base of the opposite cliff, but the distinctive UFO shape could still be made out, if you knew what you were looking for.

Gravity Falls had changed too much, and not at all. 

The landmarks that Dipper remembered, like the cliffs, had all been weathered or beaten or even completely broken down by the inexorable passage of time, the one force in the universe that even he couldn't overcome. And yet, when you looked at them with an eye that knew what they once had been, it was impossible to miss the way the new still wrapped itself around the bones of the old.

The borders of the town had sprawled out into the encroaching forest (and fought some pitched battles to do so), but at its core it remained the same small town Dipper remembered. The people, if the handful of locals he'd run into since arriving could be considered statistically significant, hadn't stopped being quirky and full of personality - and almost preternaturally unobservant. The original building housing Stanley Pines Memorial Library of the Supernatural had long ago disappeared into the forest's depths, but the town was still a go-to for scholars of the supernatural. The storefronts had changed, probably hundreds of times, but the layout of the streets in the centre of town were the same. Dipper could stroll through the town core with his eyes closed, and only have to worry about cars and hovercraft and the occasional pedestrian. 

He wasn't closing his eyes on this particular walk through downtown, though. He had a breadcrumb trail to follow.

The path that Mira had taken into the woods was clear, bright as a trail of searchlights leading down the street from the hotel and out to the edge of town. They were getting closer and closer to the cliffs, Dipper noticed uneasily. He very, very gently let his ‘Tyrone’ disguise slip another few notches, just enough to see the world through a few more senses humans didn’t have.

Mira’s trail flared to brilliant life before him, a rainbow of glittering colours the height of a human trailing down the street. Dipper breathed out, long and slow, when he didn’t see any traces of yellow or gold hanging around it. There  _was_  a thread of brighter green twining its way around the rainbow, a little like ivy, but it didn’t smell of Bill.

He could have seen more, of course, if he’d been able to shuck the human suit altogether, but -

“How can you tell which way she went?” Sun-mi...’complained’ wasn’t the right word. Maybe ‘demanded’ was closer. “I don’t see anything but street.”

“I think my senses are probably a  _little_  better than yours,” Dipper muttered, not particularly caring if Sun-mi heard him. It wasn’t all that unusual for someone to look human and not be, or to look human and not be entirely. He’d found over the years that it was much easier to misdirect people into thinking he was a different, more benign supernatural entity than he actually was, rather than trying to convince them that he was 100% authentic hand-squeezed human. 

Of course, he wouldn't have had to bother pretending  _anything_  if the only one of Mira's friends who didn't know about him hadn't insisted on coming along, but - fine. This was fine. He probably wouldn’t have been able to stay behind and let somebody else handle things if his best friend was mysteriously missing either, even if anyone else could have found Mira in the first place. Or, at least, found her trail, which was the problem. 

Dipper should have known exactly where Mira was. Her  _soul_  belonged to him, for Pete’s sake! He could  _always_  find her!

The fact that right now, all he could find was her trail did not exactly give him confidence in his decision to let - to  _help_  her come to Gravity Falls. He'd let his own nostalgia blind him to all the red flags. He'd thought, irrationally, that they'd be safe here. That Gravity Falls, despite all evidence to the contrary, wouldn't let anything happen to Mizar. He'd thought - 

Well, it didn't matter what he'd thought. Because he'd thought wrong. 

And now Mira was missing and it was all his fault.

"Werewolf?" Sun-mi asked, a trace of interest breaking through the irritable worry in her voice. It took Dipper a moment to backtrack far enough in his train of thought to figure out what she was talking about.

"Kind of a personal question, don't you think?"

"Are there any questions I could ask to learn more about you that aren't personal?" Sun-mi shot back. "How did you and Mira meet? How long have you known each other? Why hasn't she ever mentioned you? Who  _are_  you, anyway?"

"Not a werewolf," Dipper muttered, turning back to the trail.

...

The path ahead of Mira brightened slowly, from dark to dim grey to rosy, dappled with bright spots of gold where the sun slipped through the endless trees. The curious hush of the sleeping town was slowly but inexorably filling with birdsong. It was getting closer to morning the deeper she wandered into the woods.

Maybe she should have turned back the moment she'd realised the sun was starting to rise. Everyone would be worried - she hadn't left a note. 

Even as the thought crossed her mind, though, her feet still carried her forwards, the soft patter of her bare soles against the packed earth never faltering. Something swelled strange and fierce and triumphant in her chest, even as she ducked to avoid an overhanging branch. She wasn't sure if she remembered why, but - let them worry about her a little. She'd done enough worrying, for what felt like far too long, and the woods were peaceful and calm.

And welcoming.

...

The line between town and trees seemed weirdly abrupt.

Ian stared at it distrustfully. It stared distrustfully right back. If a solid wall of dark green could have a facial expression, he'd say it looked smug.

It absolutely wasn't frightening. Ian wasn't scared to go in.

"You're sure she's in there?" he asked, and Alcor - 'Tyrone' - grimaced.

"I'm sure she  _went_  in there." 'Tyrone's' eyes flicked over to meet Ian's, and Ian caught the unspoken flicker of worry in his expression. It was the opposite of reassuring.

"Then we're going in there too," Ian said, and started forward. Nobody tried to stop him, and he reached the treeline in only a few steps.

The pines and spruce towered overhead, like the walls of some huge fortress. A breeze eddied past, carrying the fresh scent of greenery, and for reasons he couldn't explain to save his life, a shiver danced up the back of Ian's neck. 

 

Somewhere above him, where the treetops took jagged bites out of the blue overhead, a crow's coughing cackle mocked Ian's bravado.  _Go on, then_ , it seemed to be saying.  _If you're so tough._

Ian gritted his teeth and stepped into the shadow of the trees. And then took one more step, into the forest.

The moment he lost sight of the sun behind the evergreens, it was as if he'd stepped into a cave. The air around him turned cold, the summer heat he'd taken for granted fizzling away into the cool, green, underwater dimness of the woods. The light shifted, shimmering through the trees and picking up a pale greenish hue as it fell. Even the background noise of the town seemed suddenly muted, like someone had turned the volume most of the way down. Ian had never been particularly outdoorsy, but he was pretty sure the entire atmosphere around him wasn't supposed to change that fast.

He turned, half-expecting to find himself alone, with only miles and miles of forest stretching out behind him, as far as he could see. But there was Gravity Falls, just the same as it had been half a second ago when he'd walked into the trees. Alcor was just a step behind him, Rosa and Sun-mi trailing a little further behind.

"This way," Alcor said, passing Ian and pointing them towards a bend in the path. Sun-mi hurried after him, dogging his heels, while Rosa slowed to wait for Ian.

"Doin' all right there?"

Ian managed a grimace that might, in the right light, be mistaken for a grin. "Don't worry about me. We've got a Mira to find."

"You know that don't make me worry any  _less_ , right?" Rosa said, looping her arm through Ian's and all but dragging him after her.

"There's just something creepy about these woods. Something more than just the fact that they apparently ate my fiancée," Ian admitted. "I feel like something's watching us."

Rosa jerked a thumb over her shoulder, to where a pointy red hat was just visible in the undergrowth.

"Ha ha," Ian said, yanking his arm back from Rosa. Or trying to, anyway. Her grip was like iron.

"Beale -" Rosa started, but Ian cut her off.

"Rose,  _please_ , I asked you to stop calling me that."

Rosa recoiled, looking stung, and then scowled. "All right. I'm sorry for that. But I'm just tryin' ta help -"

"Yeah, like you helped last time?" Ian muttered, and Rosa's scowl deepened.

"Fine. Be a miserable cuss if it makes ya feel better. But Mira's my friend too, an' I'm not sittin' round with my thumb up my ass whinin' while she's missing."

With that, she hurried ahead to catch up with the other two, leaving Ian alone with the feeling of eyes on his back.

...

"Changeling?"

Dipper paused, shut his eyes, and opened them again to a world overlaid with aura colours. Mira's trail was getting harder and harder to find in the layers of green, and somehow that worried him almost as much as the cave in the cliffs. Mira's trail should have been growing stronger as they got closer to the source, not fainter. True, they were in what was probably the most magical forest the world, but...

"What kind of changeling?" he asked. At least Sun-mi's incessant questions were a good distraction.

"Mm." Sun-mi was silent for a beat, surveying Dipper, which was  _not_  a good distraction. "Not troll, I don't think. Fey, maybe - I mean, you did just lure us all into the woods. I suppose there's also deal-born, though most of the deal-born meet unfortunate and ironic fates around puberty, it doesn't mix well with demon magic."

Dipper took a breath and let it out carefully, making sure it didn't sound too much like a sigh of relief. Mira's friend was just a shade too knowledgeable for comfort. Dipper was just lucky she'd been knowledgeable enough to talk herself out of getting too close to the truth.

"Not a changeling," he said, and paused. Ahead of him, the trail forked, and though he could still make out the vibrant colours of Mira's trail through the thick, cloying green of the forest's own magic, something made him stop and drop an arrow of gold light into the trampled-down earth and leafmould of the path, pointing back in the direction they'd come. It shone preternaturally bright in his second sight, but even as Dipper watched, that green crept in and around and over it, dimming its brilliance and dulling its sharp edges. Well, that probably wasn't good.

"Wizard?" Sun-mi asked. "I know they're not naturally gifted in the senses department, but there must be spells -"

"Sun-mi, A- _Tyrone_ , how're we doing?" Rosa interrupted, throwing an arm companionably over Dipper's shoulder. Judging by the expression on Sun-mi's face, Rosa had done the same to her with the other arm. "Please tell me we're gettin' close."

"Hard to say," Dipper answered, grateful to have something to talk about other than magical-creature-twenty-questions. "You know how they say Gravity Falls is the most magical place on Earth? The town's got nothing on the woods. It's making it really hard to tell where Mira went or even how long ago she came through."

"The forest's magical field interferes with your tracking abilities?" Sun-mi said, and Dipper gave himself a sharp mental kick. "Interesting."

Rosa shot her a confused look, before turning back to Dipper. "That don't mean you can't find her, though, does it?"

Dipper wished he could take it as her being spoiled and demanding, and ignore the note of plaintive worry in her voice.

"I sure hope not," he muttered, and, before anyone else could ask any questions, plunged forward down the path where Mira's trail had gone.

...

The path, Mira noticed with interest, had all but disappeared under her feet. A soft, plush carpet of fallen leaves and moss cushioned her every step as she wound her way around the trees, brambles and low bushes almost seeming to curl back out of her way with every step. 

They were growing fewer and farther between, though, as the trees grew larger and farther apart. A vague memory from a long-ago science class told her that as she moved deeper into the forest, she was also moving back in time. These trees must have been here for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Their branches arched overhead like the vaulted ceiling of an ancient cathedral, a reverent hush gathering among the enormous trunks.

Even without a path, Mira found, it was impossible to get lost. Her feet seemed to know where they wanted to wander, and she was content to follow them. 

It was strange. She'd left her hotel in the middle of the night to walk into the woods, without leaving a note or telling anyone where she was going, with no clear plan or destination in mind. And now it was morning, and she was still walking, into the very oldest depths of the most magical, least trustworthy forest on Earth. She could swear that the plants were moving to guide her and clear her way, and she had the faintest feeling that the movement she'd been seeing among the trees wasn't only birds and squirrels and gnomes.

And yet, she wasn't afraid. She wasn't even worried. That in itself might have worried her, but - how could it? She wasn't lost. She didn't exactly know where she was going, but her feet knew how to get there. And Dipper would always know where to find her. 

And the woods weren't frightening. In fact, much like the clearing they'd first arrived in, they felt - not friendly, maybe, but welcoming. Familiar. Like - like an older relative's house she'd visited lots when she was younger, well-known but still a little bit mysterious, but still safe, still comfortable. Almost, but not quite like...

Home.

...

The path Alcor had been leading them down had long ago faded into the underbrush. Ian's arms were scratched and bruised where he'd tried (with varying degrees of success) to push the brambles and bushes out of his way. He really hoped he didn't have any ticks embedded in his legs after all this tromping around in the brush, but he wasn't going to count on it. Rosa's petticoat had gotten so hopelessly snarled that they'd all had to stop and untangle her twice, and Sun-mi had finally conceded defeat and tucked her silky scarf away in her purse after it had caught on a branch and nearly strangled her.

"Can't you do something about this?" Ian grumbled to Alcor, once he was sure Sun-mi's attention was fixed on liberating her scarf.

"I'm trying," Alcor muttered back, turning to look at Ian, and Ian took a sharp step backwards before catching himself. 'Tyrone' looked like hell, pale as death but with a bright fever-spot of red on each cheek, and his eyes - they looked normal, at first glance, but when you were paying attention and knew what you were looking for, it was obvious that the yellowish cast to his skin was at least partly due to the glow coming off his eyeballs. "But it's fighting me."

"I thought you were the most powerful -" Ian started, his voice rising, but Alcor glanced pointedly over in Sun-mi's direction and Ian swallowed the rest of the sentence. "Are you saying this patch of  _trees_  is stronger than you are?"

"No! I'm saying the further in we get, the harder it is to keep this forest from doing what it really wants to do and just throwing us out!" Alcor reached up, like he was going to adjust the brim of a hat he wasn't wearing, then huffed out a frustrated sigh and ran his fingers up into his hair instead, grabbing a lock so that it stood up in all directions. "Okay, maybe that does mean this patch of trees is stronger than I am, but it was here before I was Al- was  _me_ , and it's had more practice!" His voice went suddenly small as he added, "Believe me, I'm doing everything I can."

Ian managed to bite back the complaint that had been lining up on his tongue, ready to spill out. It wasn't like he couldn't see that Alcor was trying. Or like he didn't know Alcor wanted to find Mira as much as or more than he did.

"Okay," he sighed. "Is there, I don't know, anything I can do to help?"

Alcor started to shake his head, and then stopped. "Actually, if you and Rosa can keep Sun-mi distracted so she stops trying to figure out what I am and how I fit into Mira's life -"

Ian nodded. "Say no more."

...

Ian stepped away from Dipper's side, and Dipper breathed a mental sigh of relief. It was enough work just keeping 'Tyrone' intact while holding the forest at bay, trying to hold a conversation at the same time was borderline impossible. And he hadn't actually  _lied_  to Ian, but - it probably wouldn't increase anybody's confidence if they knew that the further into the forest they went, the weaker Dipper was starting to feel. 

Of course, that still made him more powerful than ninety-nine percent of demons, but - this wasn't supposed to happen. He'd gotten so used to being the strongest that suddenly having that pulled out from under him was not a fun or pleasant experience. Nothing was supposed to be able to do this to him anymore! And yet, he could still feel the slow, steady sucking that was draining his power, little by little, growing stronger the closer they drew to the heart of the forest - and, if his sense of direction wasn't as clouded as his sixth sense was, the cliffs. 

Just as it had with Mira and her trail and the breadcrumb arrows he'd left along their way, the thick green web of the forest's power obscured Dipper's Sight, making it impossible for him to tell what it was that was leeching off his power. Unfortunately, Dipper thought he had a pretty good idea what it was anyway.

He cast a wary glance back at the trio following him, his eyes landing on Ian's back with a wince. It probably hadn't been a good idea to bring him. If Dipper wasn't putting two and two together and coming up with paranoia, then Mira'd been taken as bait. Bait to get him within range of the thing that was stealing his power. Bait to get Ian up to the cliffs.

Bait to get them all assembled, again, in a place where Bill Cipher could be summoned.

Rosa let out an uproarious laugh about something and punched Ian in the arm, and for a moment, Dipper was forcibly reminded of another trio who'd trailed after him like this, so many lifetimes ago. Just being here was dragging so many old memories he hadn't thought about in forever back out of the depths of his mind, and Dipper had to admit that it was bittersweet. Everything had changed so much since the last time he'd set foot in these woods.

Well. Almost everything.

Dipper turned back to the faint echo of Mira's aura hanging in the air. It was all but swallowed by green now. They'd have to make better time.

And he'd have to figure out what he was going to do once they reached the cave.

...

The trees and the undergrowth finally started to clear, but while it made it easier to walk, it didn’t actually make things  _better_. Mostly because it meant Ian could now see the birch trees all around him. Hundreds, maybe thousands of big black eyes surrounding him on all sides, boring into his back no matter where he turned. 

It was unnerving enough on its own, but that wasn’t all. The first few times he saw it, Ian thought it was just trees swaying in the wind, that he’d glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, green sweeping across his peripheral vision and then vanishing again. He’d only realised it couldn’t possibly be trees when one of them flickered red. 

After that, they were impossible to miss. It didn’t take long before the others started to notice, too. Rosa’s elbow in his side and raised eyebrow said everything, to Ian. Sun-mi was a little less tactful.

“We’re being followed,” she said, shortly. 

“No, we’re not,” Alcor said. “I lost Mira’s trail fifteen minutes ago.”

There was a moment of quiet as everyone tried to work out what he meant. The creatures following them, the lightening undergrowth, the way the forest had seemed to stop fighting them -

“You’re saying we’re being herded,” Ian said. 

Alcor just grimaced, and kept walking.

...

It felt like hours, or maybe days, before Mira's feet slowed and then came to a stop, hours that still somehow passed in the blink of an eye. Time seemed to have bent dreamlike around her, leaving her here without a real sense of how she'd gotten there.

For the first time since she'd entered the forest, Mira paused and looked around. The sunlight finally burst through the canopy in full, pouring down around her and flooding the clearing laid out before her with golden light. Every blade of pale green or gold grass, rippling gently like a shimmering sea in the faint breath of breeze, every needle on the branches of the towering evergreens and every silver-coin-flashing leaf bursting from the birches that ringed the open space, every delicate petal of the explosion of multicoloured flowers filling the clearing, were gilded with light.

But, beautiful as the whole scene was, one thing inexorably drew her eye.

The tree standing at the centre of the clearing was unlike the other trees around them, and not only because it was the only apple tree Mira had seen so far. Nor was it simply because it looked like the oldest apple tree in the world, so fantastically gnarled that it almost looped in on itself, its explosion of branches twisting like serpents. There was something about it that seemed to have its own gravity, strong enough to draw her all the way from town into the middle of the woods. It was in full leaf, its branches laden with perfect fruit. Mira's mouth watered at the sight of them.

She took a step forward, into the clearing, her mind empty of everything but the brilliant red glint of sunlight off the flawless skin of the apples.

And that was when she saw the figure standing at the base of the tree, its bare, branching antlers almost hidden by the leaves.

...

The half-glimpsed green creatures left them at the edge of a clearing. Ian could still see their flowing garments and shocking red hair peeking out from behind the birch and spruce that ringed the small circle of grass, though. The message was clear: there would be no going back the way they came.

He stepped reluctantly out into the clearing, uneasily watching the birch trees watching him. He'd had nightmares that started like this. Lots of them, in fact. Ever since he'd had a lifetime's worth of memories that didn't belong to him dropped into his head.

Ian's attention was so focused on the trees that he didn't notice Alcor had stopped walking until he collided with Alcor's back. Alcor was frozen, staring at something in the centre of the clearing, and if it could make the world's most powerful demon look like  _that_ , then Ian wasn't so sure he wanted to look and see what it was.

He finally forced himself to step out from behind the demon, to confront what Alcor had seen. If it had anything to do with what had taken Mira, then he had to face it, had to know what it was.

At first, though, he wasn't sure what the big deal was. All he saw was what looked like the oldest, ugliest apple tree in the world, the dark wood of its trunk twisted and knotted until it almost looked like it had been carved into the rough shape of a crouched human body, the bare branches springing from the bulbous knot that represented its 'head' pronged like antlers. Someone had left an axe leaning against it, and though the handle was weathered silver and half-overgrown by the tree, the blade still glinted deadly sharp.

Then it opened its eyes.

Twin blue stars flashed to life in the middle of the creature's face, blue stars flaring in the depths of impossibly deep sockets, like gazing into infinity. They seemed to bore straight into Ian, as though they were looking into his soul and out the other side.

The creature slowly unfolded itself, its body wrenching away from the tree, Ian now saw, it had begun to grow into. And it kept unfolding itself, unnaturally long limbs extending, until it towered over the four assembled searchers, seven feet or more of gnarled dark wood and inexplicable malice. One of its gangling arms ended in a clawed hand, fingers like questing roots, pointed and irresistible. The other ended in the axe.

Rosa gasped, grabbing Ian's shoulders. Sun-mi also gasped, though it was an entirely different-sounding gasp, and took a step forward, one hand scrabbling blind for her phone, her eyes never leaving the creature's face. Only Alcor didn't move, didn't react, almost like he'd known this was going to happen. Which, Ian reflected, he probably had.

The creature's knot-face cracked, splitting right across the middle, jagged edges like sharp teeth, and it let out a bone-shattering roar. Crows scattered from the treetops around them, the trees around them shook, even the ground seemed suddenly unsteady under Ian's feet.

Sun-mi jumped back, and Rosa ducked down behind Ian's back. Alcor didn't move. He stood, perfectly still, until the creature's roar slowly petered out into a curious sound, and then stopped altogether. Ian couldn’t see any real change in his appearance, but Alcor still somehow seemed taller, almost towering. Ian could feel the press of Alcor’s power on his skin, not unlike the pins and needles of blood flowing back into a limb, insistent and uncomfortable and impossible to ignore.

In the ringing silence after the roar, Alcor's voice was like a bell tolling.

"Woodsman. Where is my Mizar?


	8. Chapter 8

Once upon a time, there was a seed.

The greatest redwood forests start from a single seed, and so too it was with this seed. Dormant, it lay for decades in rich and fertile soil, waiting only for the right conditions to unfurl its tentative leaves. To put forth its questing roots.

...

The moment the words fell out of his mouth, Dipper knew he’d made a mistake.

But he’d been challenged! On his ownground! In his  _home,_ of all places, by one of his own creations! Who did the Woodsman think he was? The moment he’d seen those antlers twined into the branches of Henry’s apple tree - 

"Now hold on, hold on, back it up just a tick," Rosa said. "Who's this now?"

...

Once upon a time, there was a sapling.

It had grown from a seed, a seed nourished by magic both ancient and entirely new, a seed planted in rich and fertile soil. It was young still, its trunk no wider than a slender wrist, but its roots ran strong and deep.

The sapling grew tall and strong, entwined with the narrow trunk of an apple tree, so closely that their fruits intermingled, that they could not be told apart. Who watered one watered the other; what nourished one, nourished the other. Apple and sapling shared all things; water, sunlight, soil, the love of the one who tended their orchard, of those who sat in the shade and shelter of their branches.

And then, one day, the apple tree fell.

...

The apple tree arched shimmering branches overhead, laden with both delicate, almost translucent blossoms and glossy fruit so rich and red that Mira could swear they were dripping colour into the detritus of leaves and needles below.

In the strangest way, the scene was familiar. She couldn’t, if asked, have explained why, but - this tree was real and huge and healthy, and heavy with fruit, blossoms, and lush foliage (which, the closer Mira looked, seemed to be in all of the different seasons at once), but somehow it reminded her of nothing so much as the scrawny, spectral soul-tree she and Alcor had destroyed. 

She wasn’t scared.

That was strange, too. Maybe the strangest of all. Mira had the funniest feeling - maybe just because of the memory of that other tree, and what she’d seen and done that day - that she was supposed to be scared. And yet, the tree was unusual, maybe a little eerie, but it wasn’t frightening. In fact, just being under the canopy of its branches made Mira feel - warm. Safe. Sheltered. 

Protected.

Without, Mira realised with a start, the feeling of being maybe just a little bit... _watched_  which came with the territory of being Mizar. She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t felt Alcor’s all-seeing eye trained on her back. It was a feeling she’d learned to live with, long ago, a feeling that had been a comfort at times, even as it had been a giant pain in the ass at others. She’d gotten so used to it that she hardly even registered it anymore. Hardly noticed it was there.

And now it was gone. 

Mira didn’t know whether to feel worried or relieved.

...

Once upon a time, there was a tree.

It stood alone, and yet not alone. A forest surrounded it, a forest of old magic and older growth, a forest filled with seeds of its fruit. The number of those who sheltered under its branches grew and grew with each passing year, as the forest itself grew, as its canopy enfolded the mountainside.

And yet, the tree still stood alone. No longer intertwined with another, its trunk seemed gnarled and twisted, its branches barren but for its curious stolen fruit. Its roots ran so deep and wide now that no seed dared take root near it. No other tree dared risk tasting the soil that nourished it.

It had become an exceedingly thin and bitter soil.

Without the apple beside it, the tree was but half a tree, roots and branches spreading ever outwards, seeking after something that, in its heartwood, it knew it had lost. Something that it needed to be fully whole.

...

The hairs on the back of Ian's neck were standing on end.

That probably had something to do with the huge tree-monster with burning blue eyes roaring at them. Or the aura of power rolling off of Alcor's disintegrating human disguise. Or the redheaded figures ringing the clearing like guards, peering balefully at them from between the birches. Or the fact that, despite Alcor's accusation, Mira still wasn't anywhere to be seen. There were actually so many things to be frightened or unsettled by that Ian was starting to feel a little spoiled for choice.

But it wasn't just fear. At least, Ian didn't think it was, though, judging from the way the other two humans in their party had drawn closer together, they might be inclined to disagree. He was vibrating with energy, both nervous and strangely excited - literally vibrating, he realised, fingers drumming a staccato tattoo against his bouncing leg.

The sheer ambient magic hanging around the forest was making his mechanical eye go haywire, too, Ian realised, looking around. It had taken him an embarrassingly long time to realise that what looked like indistinct red and green shapes when seen through his left eye, easily mistaken for drifting leaves or shaking branches or the dappled shadow on a tree trunk shifting, became ethereal, green-tinted human figures with shockingly red hair when seen through the right. 

But now that they were standing inside the ring of trees, what Ian could see through his right eye had gone practically psychedelic. One minute there was nothing there but the wind in the evergreens; the next, tall redheaded figures with greenish skin and unusually long fingers; the next, everything was black and white save for the fist-sized balls of blue fire hovering where the green people had stood, shedding leaves made of blue flame that shaded to autumnal yellow at the tips and edges. 

And it wasn't only the...dryads?...that Ian's eye had decided to warp. It flickered from the clearing in full colour, to black and white interrupted only by the glow of what Ian assumed had to be magic, to a greenish haze that made it hard to tell anything apart, to fire. The enormous tree monster in the centre of the clearing was now a slim, tall, antlered figure made of blue flame, now a pale human man whose eyes were black holes and whose antlers dripped with severed hands and feet, now a hideously gnarled, blackened tree rooted firmly in the earth and twined so closely together with the apple tree that stood at the centre of the clearing that they almost looked braided together. Alcor was now Tyrone, now a crackling ball of golden light as tall as Rosa with enormous wings sweeping out to encircle the clearing, now - Ian blinked, and it had vanished, but he could have sworn he'd seen a small, dark-haired boy, about twelve or thirteen, in strange, old-fashioned clothing, standing where Alcor had stood.

The view from Ian's left eye stayed constant, steady, while the view from his right jumped wildly from one vision to the next. It was enough to give a guy a headache.

And he was getting a headache. A slow, dull throb was starting to build behind his right eye, like the prosthetic was growing too big for its socket. 

It was a familiar feeling. Ian really hoped it didn’t mean what he thought it meant.

...

Once upon a time, there was a deep, dark forest.

It had stood for a hundred hundred years, and it would stand for a hundred hundred more. And, at the very heart of the forest, there was a tree.

It stood at the centre of a clearing, a clearing it had made for itself. And for years, for centuries, it stood alone.

And then, one day, a little rabbit came hopping along and nestled down in its roots.

...

"The hell kinda magic's goin' on around here?" Rosa complained, from somewhere behind Dipper. He ignored her. "Feels like I'm seein' double."

"You're not the only one," Ian muttered, and Dipper resisted the urge to turn and look. He was talking about his artificial eye and its artificial Sight. That was all. Nothing more.

"Oh, for - am I the only person here who isn't somehow magically sensitive?!" Sun-mi protested. "What's going on? Where's Mira? What  _is_  that thing?" Dipper was sure it wasn't his imagination that that last sentence sounded more curious than annoyed or frightened.

"Based on context, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's an ancient forest spirit," Ian said. "And that it does  _not_  like us being here."

Dipper could hear the grimace in his voice, and, despite the fact that clinging to a human mask was growing more difficult and confusing by the second, couldn't help but echo it. Ian was no fool; he'd probably worked out exactly what Dipper had. If the Woodsman was walking again, these days, it almost definitely meant he felt his forest was under threat. And what greater threat than...

"Wait. You never met the Woodsman, did you?" Dipper broke concentration long enough to ask. If any of the other three noticed that the movement of 'his' lips didn't exactly sync up with the words, they were too polite to mention it.

Ian gave Dipper an odd look, made odder by the way his prosthetic eye was flickering and roving in his head. "On the one hand, you're absolutely correct, but on the other hand, I get the feeling you're talking about something else completely that I don't know if I should be agreeing with."

Dipper cleared his nonexistent throat and nodded in Sun-mi's direction. Ian winced.

"Oh,  _what_?" Sun-mi demanded, planting both hands on her hips. "Look, I'm not exactly an idiot. I know there's something here you all aren't telling me, and I'm getting pretty damn sick of it! Especially if it has some bearing on the mysterious disappearance of my best friend! You owe me the truth. Spill."

Ian glanced over at Dipper. Dipper met his eyes with a wince of his own.

"Gruargh," the Woodsman said, and Dipper started. He'd almost forgotten the big guy was there.

"Hold your horses, we'll get to you," he said to the Woodsman, whose eerie, sunken blue eyes somehow managed a kicked-puppy look, before turning back to the three humans with him. "Ian? Do you want to...?"

Sun-mi crossed her arms over her chest, fixing Ian with a penetrating stare. "I don't particularly care who it is, but somebody'd better start talking.  _Now_."

Ian pressed his lips tight together, glancing down at the waving grasses to his left. He shook his head, but didn't speak.

"Fine," Dipper said, with a sigh that rattled the remaining particles of his temporary meatsuit. "I -"

He didn't get to finish the sentence.

With a roar that literally shook the clearing, the Woodsman lunged. His impossibly long arm swept forward, knocking Rosa off her feet, and grabbed Dipper by the throat, hauling him up into the air. The Woodsman drew Dipper up close to his face, seemingly oblivious to the screams and shouts from the humans below, until Dipper was eye-to-glowing-blue-eye with the Woodsman. Through the sudden fear that spiked through him, Dipper realised the Woodsman's head seemed a lot larger than the last time they'd seen each other. Like, a  _lot_  larger. Like, the Woodsman's head was as tall as Dipper's entire meatsuit larger. It seemed the Woodsman had been isolated out in the woods for so long that he'd forgotten human scale.

Either that, or, the way he was one with the woods now, he'd grown with them.

Neither, Dipper thought stupidly, spelled good things for his very squishy human companions down below.

"Oh my stars!" one of the girls was shrieking, over and over again. Dipper hadn't pegged either of them as likely to lose their heads in a situation like this, but then again, he supposed, you never really knew until you got somebody there. Well.  _He_  knew, of course, he knew lots of things, but...when humans were involved, they could always surprise you.

"Uh," Dipper tried, into the baleful glare of that actinic blue eye. "Guess that was the wrong response...?"

The Woodsman answered by opening the gash in his bark that served as a mouth and letting out another bone-shattering roar. Literally bone-shattering. Dipper felt his meatsuit buffeted mercilessly in the wind of that roar, could feel the particles stripping away in that wind like confetti. He tried to hold them in place, but it was no use. The sheer power pouring off the Woodsman shredded his human disguise like wet tissue paper, leaving Dipper scrambling to put on an appropriately humanoid face and rein his wings back in. He'd been aiming to intimidate the Woodsman when they were only visible on the magical level, but now, without his constructed body and with his power laid bare for everyone to see, he didn't feel like burning out anybody's eyes.

The short shriek Sun-mi let out told Dipper that he hadn't been entirely successful.

"Alcor!" she yelled, waving an arm in Dipper's direction. "That's Alcor!"

Ian grimaced. "Got it in one."

"That's a  _demon_!"

"And now you're two for two," Rosa agreed, with forced nonchalance, though Dipper was pleased to note that she did at least look pale.

"And you all knew about this?" Sun-mi demanded, the shock in her voice starting to shade towards anger. "Oh my stars, did that poor schmuck he was possessing just get  _obliterated_!?"

"What? No! That meatsuit was all mine," Dipper protested.

"No humans were harmed in the making of this motion picture," Ian muttered, under his breath. Sun-mi's existential crisis didn't seem to be holding his attention any more than the Woodsman did, though - he was still busy looking around, watching the redheaded dryads who encircled the clearing, jumping at shadows. Dipper wondered if he was feeling the tug of ancient, familiar power too.

And that was all he thought about that, for a while, because it was then that the Woodsman started to  _squeeze_.

...

Mira's attention was so taken by the tree that she almost didn't notice the man standing under its branches. She wasn't sure when he'd appeared, wasn't sure whether he'd been there the whole time, standing almost inhumanly still and silent, watching her look around. The lush green grass and the laden branches waving around him made his stillness all the more pronounced.

Mira took a half-step back.

The man under the tree raised his head to look at her, but the dappled shadows of the tree's branches still obscured his features. He was tall, though, the top of his head and his shock of bright red hair hidden behind the leaves and flowers of the tree, and pale as milk. He seemed strangely familiar somehow, but the more Mira looked, the less sure she was of what he actually looked like. Was he wearing a plaid flannel shirt and jeans? A dark, formal suit? Leaves and birchbark? Anything at all?

She took another step back, and the man reached out an arm towards her. She couldn't make out his features, couldn't tell if his nose was large or small or if his eyes were wide-set or close together, but somehow she could swear that his expression was pleading.

Against all her better judgement, Mira stopped moving.

Slowly, the tall man lowered himself to one knee in front of her. As the top of his head came down out of the branches, Mira realised that it hadn't all been branches that she'd been seeing. A rack of impressive antlers, shaped like a deer's but gnarled like wood, sprouted from the man's head. Rich, red apples hung from the antlers, their colour so deep and true that Mira's mouth watered at the sight.

_( - for a second, she could swear they were dripping with it, bloody drops splashing against the leaf-littered ground - )_

Mira took a cautious step forward, and then another. The tall man's arm was still outstretched, but the closer Mira got, the easier it was to tell that he wasn't simply reaching out for her. Something was taking form in his fingers, and for a second Mira recoiled, thinking she was seeing a little brown snake crawling out of his sleeve _(leaves?)_. 

But it wasn't, when she looked closer, a snake at all. It was a slender brown root, twisting and twining itself into an empty, elaborate coil. Almost like -

The tall man raised his head, then, and looked Mira in the eye. She still couldn't seem to pin down his features, but she found herself frozen in place by eyes that were the most vibrant midsummer-sky blue.

The tall man held the ring up to Mira. She couldn't see his lips move, but the wind in the leaves, the rustle of the grass, the low buzz and hum of the bees dipping into the flowers, all seemed to come together to form one sound.

No. Not one sound. One  _word_.

 _ **Stay**_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to tumblr losing its tiny mind, I'm going to phase out posting actual fic there. If you've been following this fic there, you might want to subscribe for updates here.


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